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THE CONGREGATIONALISTS 



The Story of the Churches 



The Congregationalists 



By 
LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON 

Pastor at Assonet, Massachusetts ; and Author of *^ A 
History of American Christianity " 



NEW YORK: THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO. 
33-37 East Seventeenth St., Union Sq. North 



Copyright, 1904, 

By 

The Baker & Taylor Co. 

Published, March, igo4 



Publishers' Note 

The aim of this series is to furnish a uniform 
set of church histories, brief but complete, 
and designed to instruct the average church 
member in the origin, development, and his- 
tory of the various denominations. Many 
church histories have been issued for all de- 
nominations, but they have usually been 
volumes of such size as to discourage any 
but students of church history. Each vol- 
ume of this series, all of which will be 
written by leading historians of the various 
denominations, will not only interest the 
members of the denomination about which 
it is written, but will prove interesting to 
members of other denominations as well 
who wish to learn something of their fellow 
workers. The volumes will be bound uni- 
formly, and when the series is complete will 
make a most valuable history of the Chris- 
tian church. 



374287 



Contents 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. Definition and Plan 9 

II. Puritan Ideals 13 

III. Pilgrim and Puritan 23 

IV. The Puritan Exodus 44 

V. Controversy and Council 56 

VI. Half-Way Covenant 76 

VII. Keformation and Innovation ... 83 

VIII. A Democratic Reaction 97 

IX. A Retrospect 102 

X. Great Awakening Ill 

XI. Growth of Doctrine 133 

XII. Age of Home Missions 140 

XIII. Disruption 155 

XIV. Unitarianism 170 

XV. After the Disruption 182 

XVI. Public Reforms 201 

XVII. Congregationalism National . . . 223 

XVIII. Recent Questions 238 

XIX. The Unitarians 248 

XX. A Wider Review 255 

Bibliography 270 

Index • • • , . . 273 



The Congregationalists 



CHAPTER I 

DEFINITION AND PLAN 

Congregationalism is that principle of 
church polity according to which the unit 
of sovereignty in church government is the 
individual congregation of Christian disci- 
ples meeting habitually for worship and 
fellowship. It is distinguished from Pres- 
byterianism, according to which the unit of 
sovereignty is the neighbor congregations 
of a certain region, represented in a dele- 
gated clerico-laical body which in turn is 
subject to constitutional obligations to 
councils of wider representation and higher 
authority; it is distinguished from National- 
ism, according to which the people of each 
9 



lo The Congregational ists 

Christian country are reckoned as the church 
of that country, subject to a national hier- 
archy whether related or unrelated to the 
civil government; and it is distinguished 
from Catholicism, which holds that the en- 
tire communion of saints in all the world 
constitutes a single corporation rightfully 
subject to an individual head. 

The history of Congregationalism may be 
taken as recording the prevalence of this 
principle of the right of self-government of 
the individual congregation, as it has been 
wrought out into practical application in 
America, and propagating itself like leaven, 
has widely and deeply affected the admin- 
istration of other polities at the furthest re- 
move from itself; or as it has been exem- 
plified in those church fellowships, embrac- 
ing so large a part of Protestant America, 
by which it has been distinctly accepted; 
or especially as it is illustrated in the history 
of the sect that sometimes puts forth the 
claim to exclusive rights in the title Congre- 



Definition and Plan 1 1 

gationaiist, serving peremptory warning on 
persons and churches outside of its organi- 
zation who may use the title as descriptive 
of their polity, as for infringement of its 
trade-mark. 

The present Story of The Congregation- 
alists, beginning with the evolution of the 
Congregational polity on the soil of New 
England, will not avoid any one of these 
three lines of study. It will incidentally in- 
dicate the wide influence, direct and indi- 
rect, which their characteristic tenet has 
had throughout the country on ecclesiastical 
and even on civil polity. It will show the 
origin, and in some instances the wide ex- 
tension and multitudinous increase, of the 
several sects that are congregational in or- 
ganization. And it will trace in such detail 
as the limits of space permit, the progress 
and changes of that now somewhat highly 
organized and consolidated sect which 
claims to be known as The Congregation- 
alists. It will include in its view the growth 



12 The Congregationalists 

of like organizations in other countries, and 
some of the most nobly successful of mod- 
ern Christian missions. 



CHAPTER II 



PURITAN IDEALS 



It would be most misleading to the stu- 
dent of this part of church history, to as- 
sume that the great and splendid body of 
English clergy, gentry and yeomanry who, 
to the number of twenty thousand, arrived 
in New England in the twelve years from 
1628 to 1640, came as Congregationalists, 
to put into operation a preconceived system 
of church polity. They were rather, as 
their impassioned declarations testify, de- 
voted and affectionate members of the na- 
tional Church of England — so devoted and 
loyal that they had been earnestly intent, 
long before their departure from England, 
on seeking its highest interests in a greater 
purity of discipline and worship, in such 
wise as to have exposed themselves to the 
13 



14 The Congregationalists 

peril of estate, liberty and life. Thirty 
years before the great migration, at the ac- 
cession of James I, the aims of the Puritan 
party at that time were defined in detail in 
the famous "Millenary Petition" presented 
to the new king with the signatures of 
nearly a thousand of the established clergy. 
It is notable that they included no objection 
to the doctrinal formularies of the National 
Church, nor to its episcopal constitution. 
The petition called for a relaxation of the 
rigor of sundry ritual requirements, but its 
gravest demands were for such an adminis- 
tration of discipline as should relieve the 
Church which they served and loved of the 
shame of including in its membership, con- 
trary to the express teaching of the New 
Testament, the flagrantly and notoriously 
wicked, and in its clergy, not only the ig- 
norant, incompetent and non-resident, but 
the openly immoral. Doubtless in the 
three decades of controversy that had fol- 
lowed, the demands of the Puritan party 



Puritan Ideals 15 

had grown in extent and in definiteness, as 
on the other side new abuses and tyrannies 
had exasperated the debate. But still the 
main contention of the reforming party, 
that which gave them their party name, 
continued to be the demand that the Na- 
tional Church should no longer be an indis- 
criminate mingling, both in clergy and in 
people, of the worthy and the vile, but 
should be purified. So far as the methods 
by which this was to be accomplished had 
become defined in the minds of the leaders, 
those methods which some of them had 
seen in successful use among the Reformed 
churches of the continent and in Scotland, 
and which had been commended to multi- 
tudes of eager students in the university of 
Cambridge in the lectures of famous Thomas 
Cartwright, and which are comprehended 
under the general term of Presbyterianism, 
were undoubtedly most in favor; though it 
was impossible that Richard Hooker's great 
treatise of Ecclesiastical Polity, containing, 



i6 The Congregationalists 

with much that was antagonistic, so much 
that was highly congenial to their own 
ideas, should not have won the admiring 
attention and affected the opinions of these 
thoughtful and studious men. 

As between the two possible processes 
of purifying the Church, the Puritans had 
not the slightest hesitation. Some earnest 
spirits, impatient with the slow progress 
of reform, had taken as their motto, " Ref- 
ormation without Tarrying for Any," and 
summoned all faithful Christians to quit the 
National Church as coming out of Babylon, 
and to associate themselves in separated 
congregations. But to the Puritan party in 
general, this act of rending themselves 
from fellowship with holy ministers and 
faithful disciples in the parishes of the 
establishment was not only condemned as 
weakening the party of reform by desert- 
ing from the fighting line, but was rejected 
with sincere horror as the sin of schism. 
Some of the experiments that had been 



Puritan Ideals 17 

made, in Separatist congregations of exiles 
in the Low Countries, had not been 
attended with such success as to win the 
respect of critical observers. The Puritan 
party in the Church of England became 
the more convinced that the true method of 
reform was not that of the " come-outers " 
who would leave the national church to 
sink the deeper into the corruption in 
which it was involved, but that of staying 
within, shunning compliance with wrong, 
and striving to exclude unfit members and 
ministers by the ways of discipline pointed 
out in the Scriptures; it was not by culling 
out the holy, but by weeding out the 
reprobate. 

The first adventure towards the Puritan 
colonization of New England illustrates the 
National Church system in its most amiable 
aspect. The Rev. John White, for more 
than twenty years rector of Trinity Church, 
Dorchester, by his devoted care for his 
parishioners and his zeal for the interests of 



i8 The Congregationalists 

religion, had won from the people the title 
of "the patriarch of Dorchester." His 
solicitude for the young men of his flock 
did not cease when they were absent, as 
often happened, on fishing voyages to the 
New England coast. "He conceived the 
plan of a settlement at some convenient 
point, where sailors and fishermen, going 
ashore, might find more comfortable 
shelter and better supplies than the mere 
wilderness could give them, and might 
have the benefit of religious ministrations." 
A company of "The Dorchester Adven- 
turers" was organized with a capital of 
;^3,cxx); and some beginnings of a settle- 
ment were made on Cape Ann; but after 
two seasons of experiment the Dorchester 
Adventurers became discouraged in their 
hope of dividends and retired from the 
enterprise. But the seed was quickened 
when it died, and was "raised in glory." 

For the thought of John White, through 
all discouragements, deepened and widened 



Puritan Ideals 19 

in his mind and in the minds of the Puritan 
leaders with whom he was in correspond- 
ence in various parts of England. The 
current of public events had been for years 
setting their plans, without their knowing 
it, towards the west. The ill-starred reign 
of Charles I, under which Church affairs 
were dominated by the fierce fanaticism of 
Laud, was more and more clouding and 
even quenching the hopes alike of civil 
liberty and of church reformation. The 
starting of a poor little colony of Separa- 
tists, at Plymouth, which was just emerg- 
ing from its earliest perils and hardships; 
and now the attempt at Cape Ann, not yet 
quite extinct, stirred the minds, not of a 
few persecuted exiles, but of sundry 
''knights and gentlemen about Dorches- 
ter," together with " several other religious 
persons of like quality in and about Lon- 
don," to the great design of a Puritan 
colony across the sea, in which the ideal of 
a Christian church in a Christian state. 



20 The Congregationalists 

which they had labored, thus far in vain, 
to realize in their native land, might be 
attempted without hindrance. With many 
an example of ruinous failure in coloniza- 
tion to deter them, the noble enterprise 
was resolved upon, if only **fit men might 
be procured to go over." The condition 
was fulfilled when, June, 1628, Capt. John 
Endicott, in The Abigail, with about forty 
colonists, sailed from Weymouth, the port 
of Dorchester, for the harbor of Naumkeag, 
afterwards Salem. About a year after- 
wards the young colony was reinforced by 
more than one hundred and fifty persons 
in three vessels abundantly provisioned. 
With this company came three ministers 
carefully selected by the governing com- 
pany for their fitness for so weighty and 
exceptional a charge. A historian (not 
contemporary) relates of the foremost of 
these that " when they came to the Land's 
End, Mr. Higginson, calling up his children 
and other passengers unto the stern of the 



Puritan Ideals 21 

ship to take their last sight of England, 
said, ' We will not say, as the Separatists 
were wont to say at their leaving of Eng- 
land, Farewell, Babylon! farewell, Rome! 
but we will say, Farewell, dear England, 
farewell, the church of God in England and 
all the Christian friends there. We do not 
go to New England as Separatists from the 
Church of England, though we cannot but 
separate from the corruptions in it; but we 
go to practice the positive part of church 
reformation, and propagate the Gospel in 
America.'" Whether or not the incident 
occurred as narrated, there is no doubt that 
it expresses the sincere sentiment of the 
Puritan colonists, both towards the 
National Church which they loved, and 
towards the Separatists whose course they 
so severely reprobated. They were intent 
on planting in the wilderness a state and a 
state-church such as, in their view, England 
and the Church of England ought to have 
been. Especially (as their after course 



22 The Congregationalists 

proves) they meant to reproduce whatever 
was good in that parish system under 
which each dwelling in the kingdom was 
assigned to the charge of some minister, 
and each minister and parish church had a 
definite field of activity and responsibility. 

With conceptions like these, and with a 
noble self-consecration to Christian duty, 
the company of about two hundred colo- 
nists with Endicott for governor and the 
three ministers sent out by the Massachu- 
setts Bay Company, set themselves **to 
practice the positive part of church refor- 
mation " on the edge of the wilderness. 
But meanwhile an incident befell which 
was destined to have an important bearing 
on the course of church history in America. 



CHAPTER III 

PILGRIM AND PURITAN 

When the Massachusetts Bay Company 
planted its well provided colony at Salem, 
it was not in ignorance of the fact that fifty 
miles to the south the feeble community of 
the Plymouth Separatists was struggling 
into life. But the company's choice of a 
location was made with no purpose of fel- 
lowship with its neighbors. On the con- 
trary, the Pilgrim settlement had, from its 
beginning, been the object of distinctly un- 
friendly feeling and deed on the part of the 
religious party that was dominant in the 
company. Some of the sorest of the troub- 
les that beset that forlorn hope of a colony 
in their preparations for the voyage, and 
pursued them into their refuge in the wil- 
derness, proceeded from that Puritan party 
23 



24 The Congregationalists 

to which they were bound by identity of 
religious opinion and by feehngs of rever- 
ence towards its great preachers and the- 
ologians. The Puritans abhorred the schism 
by which the Separatists had torn them- 
selves loose from the general fellowship of 
English Christians, and had been shocked 
at the acrimonious denunciations flung back 
upon the National Church by some who had 
left it. The record of the seceders had not 
been altogether such as to command re- 
spect. Among them had been martyrs and 
confessors of whom the world was not 
worthy. But their earliest leader, Robert 
Browne, a man of prophetic mind, in 
whose writings are enunciated those prin- 
ciples of polity both in church and state 
which after three centuries have come to 
general acceptance in America, had not in 
him the stuff for a martyr, and after a 
stormy day his sun set under a cloud. Of 
the churches of The Separation, existing in 
exile under the protection of the Dutch Re- 



Pilgrim and Puritan 25 

public, some had brought scandal on their 
cause, by meddlesome attempts at disci- 
pline, by disputes over questions which to 
us seem frivolous, and by schism within 
schism. 

There was one of these congregations to 
which no part of this reproach could apply. 
The little group of neighbors who were 
wont to assemble, early in the seventeenth 
century, at a decaying manor-house of the 
Archbishops of York, of which William 
Brewster was tenant, in the little village of 
Scrooby, on the confines of Nottingham- 
shire, were men and women whose con- 
stancy under persecution, whose mutual 
love and patience, gentleness and moder- 
ation towards opponents, and noble perse- 
verance against perils and distresses in the 
prosecution of a great and beneficent enter- 
prise, would have adorned the martyrology 
of any age of the Christian Church. These 
heroic qualities were the fair reflection of 
the preeminent wisdom and holiness of the 



26 The Congregationalists 

pastor, John Robinson. We recognize in 
him, and to no small degree in the whole 
Church which he served as pastor, the com- 
bination, so rare in human nature, of un- 
compromising devotion to ideal truth and 
duty, with the patience of hope, and a 
large and loving sympathy with good men 
who differed from him. The little com- 
pany of fellow-worshippers with him who 
succeeded in escaping from the fierce per- 
secution which was resolved that it would 
neither tolerate them within the realm of 
England nor suffer them to leave it, pur- 
posely avoided implicating themselves in 
the divisions into which some other com- 
munities of exiled Separatists had fallen, 
and shunning Amsterdam, found a tempo- 
rary home in the quiet university town of 
Leyden. Constrained by noble motives, 
and filled with high hopes of what they 
might accomplish for the advancement of 
the Kingdom of God, but fully aware of 
the perils and distresses that were before 



Pilgrim and Puritan 27 

tnem in an enterprise the like of which had 
not yet been attempted by Englishmen 
without disaster, the feeble and ill provided 
company effected its lodgment on the rock 
of Plymouth on the shortest and darkest 
day of the winter of 1620. 

Few chapters of human history have 
been oftener and more worthily told than 
the story of the Pilgrim colony; and few 
have better deserved the telling. But in its 
bearing on the subject of this book it is of 
less importance than is commonly sup- 
posed. The Pilgrims, in their solitary 
hamlet of Plymouth, were far from having 
instituted what would be recognized as a 
Congregational church in the modern sense 
of the word. Their ideal of church gov- 
ernment rejected the radical democratic 
notions of Robert Browne, and held to a 
government by the eldership, sanctioned by 
the tacit or expressed consent of the mem- 
bers. To them the question of the mutual 
relation of churches was, in their utter iso- 



28 The Congregationalists 

lation, not a practical question. The 
church which gathered for worship at tuck 
of drum on the bleak hilltop of Plymouth 
was what would be called, in our modern 
nomenclature, an Independent Presbyterian 
church. 

But there was one principle to which the 
church of Plymouth stood committed by all 
its antecedents, to wit, that a Christian 
church is necessarily a church of Christians, 
withdrawn from fellowship with the 
openly unbelieving and ungodly and united 
to each other by a covenant, express or 
implied, of common duty and mutual faith- 
fulness. Yet even this principle, by which 
they had justified their withdrawal from 
the "mixed muhitude" of the English par- 
ish churches to the conventicle at Scrooby 
manor-house, was held by the Plymouth 
exiles in no such bitter and exasperated 
spirit as had been manifested by some of 
the Separatists, but in a spirit of patience, 
respect and loving fellowship, even under 



Pilgrim and Puritan 29 

extreme provocation, towards English fel- 
low-Christians who held both their princi- 
ple and their action in the severest reproba- 
tion. The latest words of saintly John 
Robinson, ''found in his study after his 
decease," were counsels of peace towards 
the unseparated brethren in the national 
church of England. In his touching fare- 
well to his departing flock, he spoke in the 
spirit of prophecy of a time when unsepa- 
rated Puritan ministers of the Church of 
England should "come to the practice of 
the ordinances out of the kingdom " and 
out of the reach of the Act of Uniformity 
and the bishops' courts, and predicted that 
Vv^hen this should be, ''there will be no 
difference between them and you." 

The exiles departed "sorrowing that they 
should see his face no more." That Robin- 
son was never again to meet the church that 
he so loved was due in part to the stern 
disapproval of Separatism which was cher- 
ished by the Puritan party in England, and 



30 The Congregationalists 

their jealous unwillingness to permit the re- 
inforcement of the Separatist colony by so 
important an accession. This was not the 
only sore distress that had been suffered by 
the Pilgrims from the sharp antagonism of 
their Puritan brethren in the national church. 
The joy that was felt in the lonely hamlet 
of Plymouth at the news that they were to 
have Christian neighbors a day's journey to 
the northward may well have been mingled 
with serious misgivings. 

But the relations between the two settle- 
ments were from the beginning most af- 
fectionate and fraternal. Upon landing at 
Salem, the three ship-loads of reinforce- 
ments for Endicott's company were found 
to be infected with the scurvy, a com- 
mon incident of long voyages in that and 
even in later centuries. Governor Endicott 
sent to Plymouth for medical aid, and the 
visit of the "beloved physician " and deacon 
of the Pilgrim church, Dr. Samuel Fuller, put 
an end to all fears, on either side, of estrange- 



Pilgrim and Puritan 31 

ment between the neighbor settlements. 
Whatever prejudgments the Salem people 
had formed against the Separatists melted 
away under the kindly ministrations of 
Deacon Fuller, and under his statement of 
the principles and usages of the Plymouth 
church. The letter of thanks from Endi- 
cott to the governor of Plymouth is a 
classic in American church history. 

To the Worshipful and my right worthy 
Friend, William Bradford, Esq., Gover- 
nor of New Plymouth, these: 

Right Worthy Sir : 

It is a thing not usual that servants to 
one master and of the same household 
should be strangers; I assure you I desire 
it not — nay, to speak more plainly, 1 cannot 
be so to you. God's people are marked 
with one and the same mark and sealed 
with one and the same seal, and have, for 
the main, one and the same heart guided 
by one and the same Spirit of truth; and 
where this is there can be no discord — nay, 
there must needs be sweet harmony. The 
same request with you I make unto the 
Lord, that we may, as Christian brethren, 
be united by a heavenly and unfeigned 



32 The Congregationalists 

love, bending all our hearts and forces in 
furthering a work beyond our strength, 
with reverence and fear fastening our eyes 
always on him that only is able to direct 
and prosper all our ways. 

I acknowledge myself much bound to 
you for your kind love and care in sending 
Mr. Fuller among us; and I rejoice much 
that I am by him satisfied touching your 
judgments of the outward form of God's 
worship. It is, as far as 1 can yet gather, 
no other than is warranted by the evidence 
of truth, and the same which 1 have pro- 
fessed and maintained ever since the Lord 
in mercy revealed himself to me; being 
very far different from the common report 
that hath been spread of you touching that 
particular. But God's children must not 
look for less here below, and it is the great 
mercy of God that he strengthens them to 
go through with it. 

I shall not need at this time to be tedious 
unto you; for, God willing, I purpose to see 
your face shortly. In the meantime, I 
humbly take my leave of you, committing 
you to the Lord's blessed protection, and 
rest." 

Your assured loving friend and servant, 
John Endicott. 

It is not difficult to trace, in the measures 
taken towards the ordering of church insti- 



Pilgrim and Puritan 33 

tutions at Salem, the precautions of prudent 
men to avoid the ecclesiastical abuses 
against which they had been protesting in 
their native land. One of the most of- 
fensive of these was the right of patronage 
by which men were thrust into the min- 
istry and imposed as pastors on unwilling 
congregations, by the authority of some 
secular person or corporation. It was easy 
to see that the conscientious and religious 
care with which the Massachusetts Com- 
pany, under whose charter and encourage- 
ment the colonists were settled, had se- 
cured three clergymen of the highest quali- 
fications for the service of the colony, 
might, if simply acquiesced in, grow into a 
precedent for reproducing in the new coun- 
try the abhorrent simony and spiritual 
tyranny of the old. It was determined that 
an appointment by the company that stood 
in the place of secular governor to the col- 
ony conferred no spiritual authority over 
the community of Christian worshippers in 



34 The Congregationalists 

Salem, and that such authority could come 
only through the free choice of the people 
themselves. Accordingly a day of fasting 
was set apart by the governor, and in the 
assembly of the people the two Church-of- 
England clergymen who were regarded as 
candidates for the eldership in the Salem 
Church gave their views as to what consti- 
tutes a call to the ministry. ''They ac- 
knowledged there was a twofold calling: 
the one an inward calling, when the Lord 
moved the heart of a man to take that call- 
ing upon him and fitted him with gifts for 
the same; the second was from the people, 
when a company of believers are joined to- 
gether in covenant to walk together in all 
the ways of God." By written ballots the 
two ministers, Skelton and Higginson, 
were chosen respectively to be pastor and 
teacher of the church. Then followed the 
solemn induction into office. " They ac- 
cepting the choice, Mr. Higginson and three 
or four more of the gravest members of 



Pilgrim and Puritan 35 

the church laid their hands on Mr. Skelton, 
using prayers therewith. This being done, 
then there was imposition of hands on Mr. 
Higginson." The church was thus pro- 
vided with its teaching eldership, and it 
was proposed to go forward and complete 
the organization by the election of other 
elders and of deacons. But for reasons 
that do not fully appear, it was deemed 
best to stay the proceedings at this point. 
They were not resumed until after other 
action of quite a different sort, the motive 
and grave significance of which to the par- 
ticipants in it is easily discernible. 

The protest of the Puritan party in the 
church of England had been not only 
against an unfit ministry forced upon the 
churches by secular power or patronage, 
but also, with not less emphasis, against 
the indiscriminate mingling, in its member- 
ship, of faithful believers in Christ, with 
the notoriously vile and wicked and even 
the publicly criminal. What precautions 



36 The Congregational! sts 

were they taking against the recrudescence 
in the new colony of this same abuse 
which had been found intolerable in 
England? And how "discern between 
the righteous and the wicked " ? Accord- 
ing to the principles of the Puritan 
Nationalists, this should be accomplished 
by the faithful exercise of church discipline, 
excluding from the fellowship of the 
church the incorrigibly unworthy. The 
other method, of culling out the well 
approved disciples from the general multi- 
tude and constituting them into a church 
by themselves — what was this but the very 
practice of the Separatists, in their zeal for 
"reformation without tarrying for any," 
against which the Puritans had protested 
as the sin of schism ? And yet what else 
was to be done ? The early records give 
indications enough that there was a dis- 
tinctly and recognizably vicious element 
mingled with even the choicest companies 
of colonists. Was it now the duty of the 



Pilgrim and Puritan 37 

Salem people, in ordering the beginnings 
of their church estate, to include in the 
brotherhood the dubious and the not at all 
dubious characters whom it would be their 
next duty to exclude by the painful stages 
of discipline? These questions may well 
have occupied the thoughts of the imper- 
fectly organized church, during the stay of 
proceedings after the ordination of the 
two teaching elders. Partly, no doubt, 
through the influence of the Plymouth 
church, but quite as much under the 
constraint of the new situation, the Chris- 
tian people of Salem entered upon a pro- 
cedure that became a type for church 
organization throughout New England, 
and has widely affected the course of 
church history in the United States, to this 
day. 

The reason assigned for adjourning the 
further organization of the church had been 
the expected arrival of another company 
from England. But without awaiting this 



38 The Congregationalists 

arrival, another day of fasting was ap- 
pointed for the election of elders and 
deacons. In preparation for this, action 
was taken that was logically antecedent to 
the election of officers, to wit, the con- 
stituting of the church. Thirty persons 
were named to be the first members of the 
church. A form of mutual covenant was 
drawn by the pen of Teacher Higginson, 
and thirty copies of it were written out; 
and on the appointed day the thirty con- 
stituent members solemnly declared: "We 
covenant with the Lord and one with 
another, and do bind ourselves, in the 
presence of God, to walk together in all 
his ways, according as he is pleased to 
reveal himself unto us in his blessed word 
of truth." This done, the church, formally 
constituted by covenant, presented anew to 
the pastor and teacher already less formally 
chosen and inducted into office the invita- 
tion to exercise these functions, and once 
more the divine blessing was invoked upon 



Pilgrim and Puritan 39 

them with laying on of hands, consecrating 
them anew to their sacred work. 

The transaction suggests certain reflec- 
tions : 

1. The Christians of Salem did accept, 
in practice if not in theory, the Pilgrim 
view that the church was to consist, not of 
the baptized persons in a community, from 
whom those proved unworthy should be 
excluded by process of discipline; but of 
persons of demonstrated fitness "called 
out" from the community, with ** power 
to add to their number" persons of like 
fitness. 

2. They probably believed that in these 
acts they were originating a church, just as 
the Pilgrims believed that they were creat- 
ing rights of government by their "social 
compact " on the Mayflower. It is easy for 
us, with our advantage of perspective, to 
see that they were only organizing a church 
already existent. If there had been no 
church in Salem, by what authority were 



40 The Congregationalists 

the thirty men detailed to do the organiz- 
ing ? 

3. The action taken implies a distinct 
recognition of independence of the national 
church of England — that the church of 
England was not the church of New 
England, any more than it was the church 
of Scotland. By virtue of removal across 
the ocean, the colonists, while still owning 
allegiance to the British crown, and 
sincerely professing their affection for the 
national church, had ceased to belong to 
"the ecclesiastical realm." 

4. The action at Salem was, and was 
meant to be, a distinct repudiation of the 
sacerdotal conception of the church and 
ministry. Like the rest of the New Eng- 
land clergy of the first generation, the two 
ministers of the Salem church had been 
episcopally ordained in England; but the 
fact was not regarded as having any validity 
in Salem. So far were the founders of the 
colony from any superstitious regard for 



Pilgrim and Puritan 41 

*'the indelibility of orders," that they not 
only renewed the laying on of hands, 
"using prayers therewith," when they 
blessed the newly inducted ministers in 
the name of the Lord; but they even 
thought it no sacrilege to repeat again that 
solemn act of benediction on the same 
persons only a few days later. 

5. It was far from the thoughts of the 
Salem colonists to found a sect. However 
mistaken they might be as to the criteria of 
Christian character, they had no intention 
of excluding from their fellowship any true 
disciple of Jesus Christ. As little did they 
intend to permit any, in the spirit of Sepa- 
ratism, to cut themselves off from the com- 
mon fellowship and organize themselves 
into a schismatic conventicle. They were 
advised that the Separatist minister, Ralph 
Smith, who had managed to get passage 
on one of their ships, should not be suffered 
to remain in the colony, " unless he will be 
conformable to our government " ; and, al- 



42 The Congregational!' sts 

though not unkindly treated, Smith found 
more congenial surroundings at Plymouth. 
In like manner, when two of the leading 
colonists, the brothers Brown, drawing 
others with them, set up a separate meeting 
with the Book of Common Prayer, they 
were called to account for their schismatic 
course, and promptly shipped back to Eng- 
land by fiery Governor Endicott, as being 
of such a factious spirit that ** New England 
was no place for such as they." 

A picturesque incident of the organiza- 
tion of the Salem church demands our 
notice. Before the ordination solemnities 
were ended, an eagerly awaited but belated 
shallop landed on the beach at Salem "the 
messengers of the church at Plymouth." 
They came into the assembly, Governor 
Bradford at their head, and in the name of 
the Pilgrim church declared their ** appro- 
bation and concurrence" and greeted the 
new church with **the right hand of fellow- 
ship." Thus was emphasized that principle 



Pilgrim and Puritan 43 

of mutual communion among independent 
churches which was to become one of the 
distinctions of American Congregational- 
ism. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PURITAN EXODUS 

While these events were in progress at 
Salem, there was preparing, on the other 
side of the sea, that notable coup d' etat 
which was to result, in a few months, in 
the creation of a powerful self-governed 
republic on the shore of the Massachusetts 
Bay. The signs of hope for the little settle- 
ment just planted, the darkening prospects 
of both church and state in England, alike 
tended to convince many of the Puritan 
leaders that the success of both their polit- 
ical and their religious aspirations was to be 
looked for rather in the New England than 
in the Old. The spirit of colonization took 
eager possession of ardent and prophetic 
minds in various parts of England; but 
there were especially three centres at which 
44 



The Puritan Exodus 45 

this spirit was most actively manifest. In 
"the west country" John White, "the 
patriarch of Dorchester," had never let go the 
project of a Christian settlement which had 
seemed to fail at Cape Ann but had now 
come to new life in Endicott's young colony 
at Salem; and he was in correspondence 
with men of means and influence like- 
minded with himself. In the northeastern 
counties, where the famous pulpit of John 
Cotton at Boston was one of several foci 
of spiritual light, and where the patient 
sufferings of the "little flock" of Scrooby 
had been working like leaven, there were 
consultations in which persons of high 
rank and consideration took part. But 
especially London, the home of patriotic 
citizenship and Puritan zeal, was a centre 
of activity and mutual conference in which 
the movements of different groups were co- 
ordinated. Not without mature though 
private counsel, and cautious advice of 
lawyers, was the bold and brilliant stroke 



46 The Congregationalists 

resolved upon, to vest the official authority 
of the Massachusetts Company in men who 
would lead the colonists in person, and 
take the royal charter, with its ample grant 
of power, across the sea, to establish the 
headquarters of authority in the colony 
itself. The great and good John Winthrop 
was made governor, and with him, or in 
surprisingly few months after him, went 
forth that Puritan migration which never 
before nor since, in the historic movements 
of the earth's population, has been equalled 
for the dignity of its manhood and woman- 
hood. In the year 1630 no fewer than 
seventeen ships, carrying about one thou- 
sand passengers, sailed from English ports 
for Massachusetts Bay. This was the be- 
ginning of The Puritan Exodus. "At the 
end of ten years from Winthrop's arrival, 
about twenty-one thousand Englishmen, or 
four thousand families, including the few 
hundreds who were here before him, had 
come over in three hundred vessels, at a 



The Puritan Exodus 47 

cost of two hundred thousand pounds 
sterling." 

The precedent set by the colonists of 
Salem, in the organization of their church 
was followed with remarkable exactness 
by the succeeding settlements. Conspicu- 
ous among them was the company of 
which Winthrop himself was leader. At 
its first settlement in Charlestown (whence 
it removed presently to become the First 
Church of Boston) the four foremost men 
of the community, Winthrop, Johnson, 
Dudley and Wilson, on an appointed day 
of prayer and fasting, subscribed their 
names to this covenant: 

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and 
in obedience to his holy will and divine or- 
dinance, we whose names are hereunder 
written, being by his most wise and good 
providence brought together into this part 
of America in the Bay of Massachusetts, 
and desirous to unite ourselves into one 
congregation or church under the Lord 
Jesus Christ our Head, in such sort as be- 
cometh all those whom he hath redeemed 



48 The Congregationalists 

and sanctified to himself, do hereby sol- 
emnly and religiously, as in his most holy 
presence, promise and bind ourselves to 
walk in all our ways according to the rule 
of the gospel, and in all sincere conformity 
to his holy ordinances, and in mutual love 
and respect each to other, so near as God 
shall give us grace. 



Thus having "united themselves into a 
church" by a mutual covenant in which 
they "bound themselves" to nothing to 
which they were not already bound as dis- 
ciples of Christ, they were in a position to 
admit, or refuse to admit, others to their 
fellowship. That 30th of July, 1630, was a 
memorable day in New England history, 
when, with solemn prayer and fasting in 
which the churches already constituted in 
Plymouth and in Salem joined with their 
newly arrived brethren, the two churches 
of Charlestown and Watertown were or- 
ganized and their ministry inducted into 
office with laying on of hands. The church 
of Dorchester had this distinction, that al- 



The Puritan Exodus 49 

ready, as the company was about to sail 
from Plymouth, it had been organized at a 
meeting held at "the New Hospital" of 
that town, when a sermon was preached by 
"the patriarch" John White. 

The most typical of these acts of church 
organization was that of the founders of 
New Haven. Led by Davenport and Eaton, 
they had arrived at "their desired haven" 
in the early spring of 1638, but not until 
fourteen months later, after much prayer, 
study and discussion, did they consider the 
business fully mature for action. Soon 
after their landing they had made a provi- 
sional "plantation covenant" mutually 
pledging themselves to be governed in their 
future action relating either to the church or 
to the civil order, "by those rules which 
the Scripture holds forth." During these 
toilsome first months of the new plantation, 
while their views of polity in church and 
state were so deliberately canvassed, they 
were not without organization. The town 



5© The Congregationalists 

was "cast into several private meetings 
wherein they that dwelt most together gave 
their accounts one to another of God's gra- 
cious work upon them, and prayed to- 
gether, and conferred to mutual edification, 
and had knowledge one of another." 
When at last they were assembled " in Mr. 
Newman's barn" the solemnities of the 
day were introduced by a sermon from 
Davenport on this text, "Wisdom hath 
builded her house; she hath hewn out her 
seven pillars." By common consent it was 
agreed "that twelve men be chosen, that 
their fitness for the foundation-work may 
be tried;" and "that it be in the power of 
these twelve to choose out of themselves 
seven that shall be most approved of the 
major part, to begin the church." It was 
the 14th of June, 1639, when the "seven 
pillars " were hewn out. By covenant 
among themselves, and by receiving others 
into the same compact, it was held that a 
church was constituted on the 22d of 



The Puritan Exodus 51 

August. It is wonderful that in these and 
like proceedings it did not grow clear to the 
minds of the founders that instead of creat- 
ing church and civil state by their ** social 
compact," they were simply putting into 
orderly and organic form the church and 
state already in being. With one accord 
they accepted so much of the Separatist 
polity as to hold that the church existed by 
virtue of a mutual agreement (either tacit 
or expressed) among certain individual be- 
lievers that they would be a church. It is 
easy to believe that the example and argu- 
ment of the Plymouth Separatists had less 
to do in bringing them to this position, 
than the exigencies of the situation. To 
the extreme tenets of the extreme Separa- 
tists, renouncing fellowship with faithful 
ministers and worshippers in the Church of 
England, the churches of New England 
generally gave no adhesion. 

In the year 1640 the assembling of the 
Long Parliament secured protection to the 



52 The Congregationalists 

Puritans in England, and the Puritan Exodus 
to America ceased. At this date there were 
forty churches in New England, all formed 
after substantially the same model, beside 
three in Long Island. The Exodus had in- 
cluded a very large proportion of able and 
learned ministers, so that it was possible in 
many churches to realize the ideal of the 
founders, that each church should be pro- 
vided with its presbytery of two teaching 
elders (pastor and teacher) as well as one or 
more ruling elders. These officers, with 
deacons who should be the church al- 
moners, were chosen by free election, and 
the teaching elders inducted into office with 
the laying on of hands. That no disrespect 
was intended to the ministry that they had 
formerly exercised in English parishes was 
expressly declared in Mr. Wilson's protest 
to that effect at his ordination as teacher of 
the Boston Church. But that the former 
ministry was held to confer no authority 
over God's heritage in New England was 



The Puritan Exodus 53 

made equally explicit by the declaration of 
George Phillips, the intended minister of 
Watertown, that if his people ''will have 
him stand minister by that calling which he 
received from the prelates in England, he 
will leave them." 

The churches thus constituted were dis- 
tinctly Presbyterian in their internal struc- 
ture, being governed by the board of elders 
with the sanction, either tacit or explicit, 
of the brotherhood. In their mutual rela- 
tions the churches were independent, yet 
acknowledging the duty of mutual helpful- 
ness and mutual respect and deference. 
But upon this independence was one serious 
limitation. In Massachusetts the "Great 
and General Court" was, in a very prac- 
tical sense, a Church court. None but 
communicants in the churches were either 
electors to it or eligible to it. It '* exer- 
cised a minute superintendence, after the 
manner of the English Parliament and 
Courts Spiritual, ... on all manner of 



54 The Congregational ists 

ecclesiastical subjects" (Buck's "Massa- 
chusetts Ecclesiastical Law," 21). In par- 
ticular the supreme authority of the colony 
was resolved not to lose any good that 
could be saved out of that parochial system 
under which the England of their time was 
divided into nine thousand parishes, each 
with its church and minister. The arriving 
colonists were not permitted to scatter 
through the wilderness at pleasure. It was 
for the colonial government to assign to 
each successive company its place of habi- 
tation, and to draw the boundaries of its 
township, which were also the parish 
boundaries, except as, with the increase of 
population, it by and by became expedient 
in many cases to divide the township into 
two or more parishes. Each parish was 
rigorously required to be provided with 
church, clergy, meeting-house and parson- 
age. It was the purpose of the founders 
that every church should have its well de- 
fined responsibility for every soul within its 



The Puritan Exodus 55 

parish bounds. The adjustment of relative 
rights and duties between churches and 
parishioners occupied not a little of the at- 
tention of the early colonial governments. 
The constitution of the New England 
churches of the first generation may per- 
haps best be characterized as Presbyterian- 
ism with a synod of lay delegates. It was 
a long process of evolution by which the 
system now known as Congregationalism 
came into existence. 



CHAPTER V 

CONTROVERSY AND COUNCIL 

"It must needs be that offenses come." 
It was only by the pressure of severe exi- 
gencies that the polity of the young 
churches of New England could be com- 
pletely shaped. One of the first of them 
was the exasperated controversy that arose 
over the case of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson. 
Only four years after the settlement of Bos- 
ton, and only a year after the arrival of the 
great John Cotton to become the teacher of 
the Boston church, this admiring parish- 
ioner of his in the old Boston church fol- 
lowed him, attended by her husband, to his 
new field of work. She had many qualifi- 
cations for a mischief-maker, a kindly heart 
and skillful hand in nursing the sick, a 
ready gift of pious eloquence, an inordinate 
56 



Controversy and Council 57 

conceit of her superior holiness and her 
special confidential relations with the Al- 
mighty, a pleasant way of gently flattering 
her influential adherents, and a rasping sar- 
casm for dissentients. With her weekly 
meeting, at first for women only, in which 
she criticised the Sunday's sermons, dealing 
out approval for Mr. Cotton and her 
brother-in-law Wheelwright as being in the 
covenant of grace, and disparaging with 
contemptuous pity the rest of the clergy as 
being under the covenant of works, she 
managed before long to get not only the 
church and the town but the whole colony 
into a broil. The election of Governor was 
made to turn on the theological question; 
and the dashing and impulsive young 
Harry Vane, newly arrived from England 
with the prestige of distinguished family 
and influence at court, was made to super- 
sede the wise and faithful Winthrop. The 
situation affected the fathers of the colony 
with a threefold anxiety: first, the preten- 



58 The Congregationalists 

sions of this enthusiastic prophetess to 
direct revelations from heaven threatened 
the foundations of the republic which rested 
on the sufficiency of the Scripture as a 
guide to political as well as personal life; 
secondly, the Hutchinson conventicle was 
of a schismatic temper and tendency, pro- 
ducing, if not seeking, the division of the 
Boston church into two parties exasperated 
by personal irritation; thirdly, the teachings 
of the new leader seemed to be charged 
with a pernicious and demoralizing anti- 
nomianism. The case required action. In 
a fast-day sermon to the Boston church, 
Wheelwright, after a manner usual with 
the supersanctified, essayed to "beat 
his fellow-servants " denouncing them as 
"Antichrists"; and was censured for it at 
the next meeting of the General Court, 
acting as representative of all the churches. 
The " Antinomian Controversy" would 
not have been entitled to so large space in 
so condensed a narrative as this, but for its 



Controversy and Council 59 

having been the occasion of the first of 
those ecclesiastical councils which are so 
characteristic of American Congregational- 
ism. At the invitation and at the charges 
of the colonial legislature, a "synod" 
was convened at Cambridge, which in- 
cluded "all the teaching elders through 
the country," with "sundry elders from 
other jurisdictions" and "messengers 
from all the churches." From the 30th 
of August to the 22d of September the 
council sat in solemn, sometimes in tender 
and tearful debate. At last, with an almost 
unhoped-for approach to unanimity, it gave 
its condemnation of eighty-two errors 
alleged against the party of Mrs. Hutchin- 
son. Even Mr. Cotton was drawn into 
substantial harmony with the council. 
The whole course of consultation had been 
so wise, sincere and Christian, that Gov- 
ernor Winthrop proposed that there should 
be annual synods. But the centripetal 
force was well balanced by the centrifugal. 



6o The Congregationalists 

Salutary as had been the influence of the 
council, the opinion prevailed that it was 
safer for the independence and liberty of 
the churches that such assemblies should 
be convened only as occasion might seem 
to require. 

The action of the civil authority was 
summary and severe. Some of the adher- 
ents of the Hutchinson faction were dis- 
franchised; and the two leaders, Wheel- 
wright and Mrs. Hutchinson herself, were 
banished. They seem with little doubt to 
have been willful and insolent mischief- 
makers in the little community; and in 
their case, as before in the case of the 
Browne brothers in Salem, and afterwards 
in the case of Roger Williams, it was held 
that persons who could not get on com- 
fortably with their neighbors should seek 
other neighborhood. There was more 
justification and less hardship in such a 
judgment, in the feeble beginnings of a 
small community than there would have 



Controversy and Council 61 

been afterwards, under settled and assured 
institutions and a wider domain. 

The occasions for further consultation 
among the churches were not long in 
arising. In 1643, six years from the ad- 
journment of the first Cambridge synod, a 
meeting of the clergy of the several colonies 
was held, also at Cambridge, at which 
Cotton and Hooker presided and questions 
of polity were discussed. But three years 
more had not passed before new exigencies 
demanded the convoking of another 
"synod," not of the clergy only but of 
the churches. To begin with, there were 
considerable divergences of opinion and 
practice in the internal administration of 
some leading churches of New England. 
The ministers of Newbury and Hingham, 
going a step beyond the generally accepted 
aristocratic notion of church government, 
would limit the action of the membership 
to the election of teaching and ruling 
elders; while the general tendency of the 



62 The Congregationalists 

churches was in the contrary direction, to- 
wards greater power and responsibility in 
the private members. Secondly, like ques- 
tions were beginning to agitate the Puritan 
party in England, and questions bearing on 
the momentous task of the reorganization 
of the Church of England were formulated 
and sent across the sea — first a series of 
Nine Questions and then a series of Thirty- 
two Questions — which were answered by 
eminent New Englanders, Davenport, and 
Cotton, and Richard Mather, but which 
were felt to be entitled to a more authorita- 
tive answer than could be given by in- 
dividuals. But the chief urgency for con- 
sultation proceeded from the formidable 
consequences, destined to grow more 
formidable still through several agitated 
generations, of the principle adopted from 
the Separatists, that the purity of the 
church was to be sought, not by the 
eliminating of unfit members, but by the 
culling of choice material for a new 



Controversy and Council 63 

organization that should decide on applica- 
tions for admission. The colonies had to 
face the fact that already in 1643 a painfully 
large proportion of the people were stand- 
ing outside of the church. In Massa- 
chusetts, where the suffrage was con- 
ditioned on church membership, the 
active citizenship was reduced to an 
oligarchy of about one in ten. It was not 
only felt as a grievance to be thus shut out 
from the body politic; but some were 
sincerely complaining of the spiritual 
privation of being excluded, themselves 
and their families, from the sacraments; 
on the other hand, the churches themselves 
felt weakened by the exclusion of many 
who could hardly be pronounced less fit 
for church fellowship than those who 
were within the pale. 

And yet it does not appear that there was 
any intent on the part of the Founders to 
draw lines excluding from the church any 
sincere disciple of Jesus Christ. The idea 



64 The Congregationalists 

of establishing sectarian churches for a cer- 
tain style of Christian from which other 
sorts of Christians should be excluded be- 
longs to a later age, and would have been 
abhorrent to the first generation. They sin- 
cerely meant that all the faithful Christians 
of each town should be the church of that 
town, exercising all the functions of a 
church free of interference from without; 
but in seeking this worthy object they fell 
into two grave mistakes, i. In their right- 
eous reaction from the miserable corruption 
of the English parish churches they went to 
the opposite extreme, not only putting out 
the demonstrably unworthy, but keeping 
out those whose worthiness was not satis- 
factorily demonstrated. In their diligent 
searchings of Scripture for rules of church 
order, they missed the lesson of the parable 
of The Tares of the Field. 2. Their chief 
criterion of fitness for church fellowship, 
the narration by the candidate of his con- 
scious experience of a change divinely 



Controversy and Council 65 

wrought in his character, was most falla- 
cious, easily admitting many unfit, but 
practically excluding some whose lives ap- 
proved them to all observers as being of 
the number of the saints. The growing 
number of good men outside of the church, 
some of them claiming as of right privileges 
which were denied them, made a third oc- 
casion for the Synod of Cambridge, 1646-48. 
The story of the summoning of the 
synod, its gathering from the four colonies, 
its successive adjournments, and the polit- 
ical difficulties in which it was somewhat 
implicated — " is it not written in the chron- 
icles?" It may be found exact and ample 
in Professor Walker's "Creeds and Plat- 
forms." The seventeen chapters of the 
Cambridge "Platform of Church Discipline 
Gathered out of the Word of God" em- 
bodied the results of twenty years of study 
and experience, and remained for a hun- 
dred years an authoritative statement of the 
polity of the New England churches. The 



66 The Congregationalists 

titles of the chapters indicate the subject- 
matter. 

** Chapter I. Of the Form of Church 
Government, and that it is one, immutable, 
and prescribed in the Word of God. 

" Chapter II. Of the Nature of the Cath- 
olic Church in general, and in special, of a 
particular visible church. 

" Chapter III. Of the Matter of the Visi- 
ble Church, both in respect of Quality and 
Quantity. 

''Chapter IV. Of the Form of a Visible 
Church, and of church covenant. 

"Chapter V. Of the first subject of 
Church Power; or, to whom church power 
doth first belong. 

"Chapter VI. Of the Officers of the 
Church, and especially of pastors and 
teachers. 

"Chapter VII. Of Ruling Elders and 
Deacons. 

" Chapter VIII. Of the Election of Church 
Officers. 



Controversy and Council 67 

"Chapter IX. Of Ordination and Impo- 
sition of Hands. 

"Chapter X. Of the Power of the 
Church, and its Presbytery. 

"Chapter XI. Of the Maintenance of 
Church Officers. 

"Chapter XII. Of Admission of Mem- 
bers into the Church. 

"Chapter XIII. Of Church Members: 
their removal from one church to another; 
and of letters of recommendation and dis- 
mission. 

"Chapter XIV. Of Excommunication 
and other Censures. 

"Chapter XV. Of the Communion of 
Churches one with another. 

"Chapter XVI. Of Synods. 

' ' Chapter XVII. Of the Civil Magistrate's 
Power in Matters Ecclesiastical." 

It is of practical as well as historical in- 
terest to us of the present age to note the 
points at which existing Congregational 
churches have departed from this early type. 



68 The Congregationalists 

I. The high jure divino pretensions of 
the Founders that theirs is the only author- 
ized and prescribed form of church govern- 
ment, if sometimes entertained, are now 
rarely urged. 

II. The negative statement that the New 
Testament church was "neither national, 
provincial nor classical," but '' only congre- 
gational," is still accepted by Congregation- 
alists. 

III. The principle that a church should 
consist of "saints by calling" and of *'the 
children of such, who are also holy," is ac- 
cepted in statement, even when disregarded 
in practice; but the principle enunciated 
with emphasis here and elsewhere in the 
*' Platform," that a minister is such only by 
virtue of his election to office in a congre- 
gation, and has no ministerial standing out- 
side of that congregation or after the close 
of his ofiFicial function therein, however es- 
sential to the logical unity of the system, is 
generally abandoned, and the idea of a min- 



Controversy and Council 69 

isterial order, against which the fathers pro- 
tested, is generally accepted. 

IV. The assertion that a mutual covenant 
is the necessary condition of the existence 
of a church, and the only source of church 
authority, if accepted and acted on by mod- 
ern Congregationalists in the internal af- 
fairs and mutual relations of their churches, 
is frankly abandoned by their recognition 
of churches otherwise constituted. Hap- 
pily, the "Platform" cautiously provides 
that a covenant merely implied, "without 
any writing or expression of words at all," 
may be valid. 

V. The tenet that church authority, by 
the charter of the church, which is the New 
Testament, is vested primarily in the broth- 
erhood, is accepted; but that it is to be 
exercised only in the election of elders is 
generally declined. 

VI. and Vll. The ideal of the Founders 
was that each church should be equipped 
with its presbytery of not less than three — 



yo The Congregationalists 

pastor, teacher and ruling elders. The first 
two giving themselves wholly to the minis- 
try of the word and sacraments, were to 
be supported by the church. The ruling 
elder was charged with the executive 
functions of the church, and with not a 
few of the spiritual. The presbytery were 
jointly to administer the government of the 
church, with the consent (tacit or express) 
of the brotherhood. This ideal ceased to 
be realized after the first generation. The 
distinction between pastor and teacher, al- 
ways somewhat tenuous, was insufficient 
to justify each little congregation in the cost 
of maintaining two ministers. The duties 
of ruling elder were such, in point of diffi- 
culty and delicacy as the fit person could 
rarely be induced to undertake. -Finally, 
the growing spirit of democracy, both in 
state and in church, was more averse to the 
vesting of church authority in an elective 
eldership. At the present day, the officers 
of a Congregational church are ordinarily a 



Controversy and Council 71 

pastor and deacons, and such committees 
as the church may wish. The ideal of the 
congregational presbytery survives only in 
the ''Standing Committee" which fulfills 
some of its functions. 

VIII and IX. The sturdy protest of the 
Founders against regarding ordination as a 
quasisacrament conferring permanent rank 
among Christians has been forsaken. 
With them ordination was nothing but 
the solemn inauguration of church officers 
into the places to which they had been 
elected. The imposition of hands might 
be by other elders in the same church, or 
by some of the people, or even (if thought 
best) by elders of other churches. A min- 
ister "clearly loosed from his office-rela- 
tion " is no longer a minister nor qualified 
to act as such, until again called to office, 
in which case he may be ordained to the 
office, with imposition of hands. The 
general practice of the Congregational 
churches of the present day proceeds upon 



72 The Congregationalists 

the opposite theory, that ordination con- 
fers upon the subject a permanent minis- 
terial status. At his first induction into 
church office he is said, in Presbyterian 
phrase, to be "ordained and installed." 
Afterwards, at any future settlement, he is 
said to be simply "installed" and (as if 
conforming to some sacerdotal notion of 
the "indelibility of orders") the laying on 
of hands is solemnly omitted. 

X. The views of the aristocracy of the 
eldership drawn out in detail in this chapter, 
are no longer entertained. 

XI. The moral principle binding it as an 
obligation on those who profit by the min- 
istrations of the church to contribute to the 
maintenance of it, are as distinctly recog- 
nized now as ever; the enforcing of these 
obligations by the civil power is no longer 
resorted to. 

XII. In this chapter on "Admission of 
Members," two things are noteworthy: i, 
the rigorous insistence on evidence of re- 



Controversy and Council 73 

pentance and faith, to be presented by each 
candidate in the form of *'a personal and 
public confession and declaring of God's 
manner of working upon the soul; " 2, the 
emphatic absence of any other test. It is 
the obvious intention of the Founders that 
the church of each community was to in- 
clude all penitent believers there dwelling. 
The notion that a church might be organ- 
ized of a certain class of Christians, from 
which certain other Christians should be 
intentionally excluded by a prescribed doc- 
trinal or other test was foreign to their 
conception of the church. 

XIII. Both in the theory and in the prac- 
tice of the early days, the church assumed 
a responsibility for the movements of its 
members such as would be neither claimed 
nor conceded at present. 

XIV, XV, XVI. The general principles 
here enunciated have not ceased to express 
the views of Congregational churches. 
Throughout the " Platform " it is to be ob- 



74 The Congregationalists 

served that while " high " views of the au- 
thority of the eldership are set forth; never- 
theless, in distinct contradiction to the 
Presbyterianism of Newbury and Hingham, 
it is recognized that the ultimate authority 
in questions of admitting or excluding is 
vested in the brotherhood. The demo- 
cratic principle thus laid down as of divine 
authority has gained more and more in gen- 
eral recognition and in width of application. 
XVII. It is much to the honor of the 
wisdom of the synod that the concluding 
chapter ** Of the Civil Magistrates' Power 
in Matters Ecclesiastical," contains so little 
to provoke the dissent of later ages. A 
change that is rather of practice than of 
principle has necessarily followed upon the 
change from homogeneous communities to 
communities divided by the widest di- 
vergences of opinion and organization. A 
worthy jealousy of that Erastianism of the 
English Church which their souls abhorred, 
saved them from grave mistakes. 



Controversy and Council 75 

Two of the topics commended to the 
Synod by the General Court of Massachu- 
setts received little attention. The growing 
difficulties attending on the question of 
"baptism and the persons to be received 
thereto," were left unsolved. The duty of 
preparing a Confession setting forth the 
doctrinal tenets held in common by the 
Christians of New England was superseded 
by the timely arrival, fresh from the hands 
of its makers, of the Westminster Con- 
fession, which met with the unanimous and 
glad approval of the Synod, " for the sub- 
stance thereof," as *' very holy, orthodox 
and judicious in all matters of faith." For 
more than one hundred and fifty years, the 
Westminster standards continued to be re- 
ferred to by men of differing theological 
parties as expressing the common belief of 
the churches; and in families and even in 
the common schools the " Shorter Cate- 
chism " was used as a manual of religious 
instruction. 



CHAPTER VI 

HALF-WAY COVENANT 

The question which the synod at Cam- 
bridge had pushed aside still insisted on an 
answer. A conflict seemed to be growing 
more serious with the lapse of every year, 
between two ideals, both dear to the Puri- 
tan heart: — the purity of the church, as 
consisting of " visible saints and their chil- 
dren," and the parish system by which the 
whole population of the several towns 
should be held under the tutelage of the 
churches. The growing danger was seri- 
ously felt by both parties. The churches 
and pastors saw the increasing number of 
those who failed to pass the accepted cri- 
teria of membership, and were in danger 
of drifting afar from any relation to the 
church; and on the other hand those who 
76 



Half- Way Covenant 77 

had been baptized into the church, who 
held and cherished the truth that had been 
taught them, and whose lives were without 
reproach, but who were unable to testify to 
the conscious experience of a spiritual 
change from death to life, found not only 
themselves debarred from the communion, 
but their children excluded from baptism 
as aliens and "strangers from the cove- 
nants of the promise." The situation was 
growing each year more tense, and there 
were tendencies in two opposite directions 
towards a solution of it. One was towards 
the severely logical individualism of the 
Baptists, which had no place for infant 
baptism or infant church-membership. 
The other was towards "the parish way," 
or the Presbyterian way, according to 
which the baptized children of the parish, 
arriving at years of discretion and being 
without reproach, were all to be welcomed 
to the Lord's table. That the accepted 
criterion of fitness for church-membership 



78 The Congregationalists 

was fallacious, that, strictly applied, it 
would have excluded from communion the 
foremost theologian and saint of the con- 
temporary Puritan party, Richard Baxter, 
was not going to be made entirely clear to 
their successors until six generations after- 
wards (1847) by Horace Bushnell in his 
treatise of " Christian Nurture." 

The divergence of opinion and of practice 
was so great and so manifestly increasing 
as to call for action on the part of the 
colonial legislatures — always prone to an 
exorbitant sense of their responsibility in 
spiritual matters. In 1657 the Massachu- 
setts General Court, moved thereto by 
Connecticut, invited a conference of lead- 
ing pastors who, gathering at Boston to the 
number of seventeen, gave counsel de- 
cidedly in favor of a more relaxed rule than 
that of the Founders. But this was far 
from appeasing the controversy. The 
sincere and painful anxiety of such 
venerated men as Davenport and Charles 



Half-Way Covenant 79 

Chauncy prevailed with many others 
against any abatement of the conditions of 
membership in the church. A true synod, 
including not ministers only but "mes- 
sengers of the churches," was summoned 
to meet at Boston in 1662, and the number 
in attendance — more than seventy — was 
proof of the gravity of the question at 
issue. After protracted and earnest dis- 
cussion, by a great majority but in face of 
an earnest protest from some of the best 
men, the main question before the synod 
was thus resolved: 



"Church-members who were admitted 
in minority, understanding the doctrine of 
faith and publicly professing their assent 
thereto; not scandalous in life, and 
solemnly owning the covenant before the 
church, wherein they give up themselves 
and their children to the Lord and subject 
themselves to the government of Christ 
in the church, — their children are to be 
baptized." 

It was an illogical compromise between 



8o The Congregationalists 

irreconcilable principles. It came, indeed, 
into general use in New England, but 
never with universal consent. Instead of 
ending controversy, it intensified it, giving 
rise to a copious polemical literature. In 
conspicuous instances, as in Hartford and 
in Boston, it rent churches asunder. From 
New Haven the great and good Davenport, 
foreseeing the ruin about to befall his 
cherished ideals through the merger of that 
little republic with Connecticut, left behind 
him the fair plain that was dearer to his 
heart than native land, exclaiming *'in New 
Haven Colony Christ's interest is miserably 
lost," and went to assume, in his old age, 
the pastoral office in the First Church in 
Boston, from which many members had 
withdrawn to practise the less rigid system 
in the Third Boston Church— the ''Old 
South." The " Half- Way Covenant" con- 
tinued in general use for nearly a century, 
until it melted away in the fervent heat of 
"the Great Awakening," or withered 



Halt- Way Covenant 81 

under the rigors of the Edwardean 
theology. 

An even larger relaxation of the condi- 
tions of church communion was proposed 
by one of the saintliest and most spiritually 
successful pastors of the time — Solomon 
Stoddard of Northampton. He held that 
the baptized church-member sound in 
doctrine and of unblemished life should be 
not merely admitted to a quasi-fellowship, 
transmissible in turn to his children, but 
welcomed to full communion, with the 
hope that the sacraments of the church 
would be effectual, with the word, in the 
work of grace of which the candidate had 
been thus far unconscious. This view and 
practice gained not a little currency. It was 
a frank abandonment of the church-princi- 
ple which the Founders had adopted from 
the Separatists of Plymouth. Under the in- 
fluence of Stoddard's grandson, colleague, 
and successor in the Northampton church, 
Jonathan Edwards, the churches began the 



82 The Congregationalists 

painful return to their earlier principles. At 
the present day those principles are gener- 
ally held in the Congregational churches of 
America; but with an intelligence and 
liberality in the application of them, by 
which some of the embarrassments en- 
countered in the early days are avoided. 



CHAPTER VII 

REFORMATION AND INNOVATION 

The hopes that had been honestly enter- 
tained of great good to churches and peo- 
ple, to result from the successive councils 
of pastors and of churches were not real- 
ized. At the end of a half century from 
the great Puritan migration, the men of the 
second generation looked about them on 
that field in which, in prayer and suffering 
and eager hope, the fathers had sowed 
" wholly a right seed," and felt something 
of the dismay with which the servants of 
the householder put to their lord the ques- 
tion, "Whence then hath it tares?" This 
garden of the Lord seemed overrun with 
foul weeds. Through what agitating vicis- 
situdes these colonies had passed, in these 
fifty years! The tyranny of Charles and 
Laud, that had sent the fathers of New 
83 



84 The Congregationalists 

England across the ocean, had given place 
to the Long Parliament and the Common- 
wealth, and this in turn to the Protectorate. 
And now, at last, the Restoration had placed 
the perfidious Stuarts again in power, and 
was threatening to exterminate the char- 
tered liberties of the colonies, and over- 
throw their institutions, civil and ecclesias- 
tical. On our own side of the sea, the 
noble figures of the first leaders were no 
more seen ; only a few venerable heads, as 
of John Eliot and Governor Bradstreet, re- 
mained of all that goodly fellowship. 
There were many signs of outward pros- 
perity. The three pioneer churches of 
Plymouth, Salem and Boston had grown to 
some six score. But it seemed to some 
that he who had multiplied the people had 
not increased the joy. There had been 
failure of crops and shipwrecks at sea. 
The colonies had been scourged by pesti- 
lences. The long peace with the Indians — 
reward of just and generous dealing with 



Reformation and Innovation 85 

them on the part of the colonists — had 
been followed by the horrors and desola- 
tions of King Philip's war. These were 
only part of the multiplying disasters which 
stirred men's minds to ponder "the causes 
and state of God's controversy " with the 
people. A memorial to the General Court 
of Massachusetts was presented by eighteen 
of the clergy led by Increase Mather, then 
easily the foremost man in New England, 
asking that a synod of the churches be 
called to consider the questions: What are 
the evils that have provoked the Lord to 
bring his judgment on New England ? and 
What is to be done that those evils may be 
reformed ? 

Thus was constituted **The Reforming 
Synod," whose answer to the first question 
proposed recounted thirteen prevailing evils 
as signs of growing worldliness and un- 
godliness; and to the second question pre- 
scribed twelve remedies: i. Good exam- 
ple on the part of those in authority, in 



86 The Congregationalists 

family, in church and in state. 2. A re- 
newed declaration of adherence to "the 
faith and order of the Gospel." 3. Greater 
strictness in admitting to full communion. 
4. Faithfulness in church discipline, not 
only towards parents, but towards the chil- 
dren of the church. 5. The restoration of 
the complete ministry, in each church, of 
pastor, teacher, and ruling elders. 6. That 
the magistrates should see to it that the 
church officers have due support. 7. Faith- 
ful execution of wholesome laws, in par- 
ticular the laws restricting the sale of strong 
drink. 8. The solemn and explicit renewal 
of covenant. 9. In such renewal, distinct 
pledges of reformation of prevailing sins. 
10. In renewing covenant, that the churches 
agree in common vows "to promote the 
interest of holiness and close walking with 
God." II. Effectual care for the schools 
and the college. 12. Earnest prayer that 
God " would be pleased to rain down right- 
eousness upon us." 



Reformation and Innovation 87 

The remaining task of "The Reforming 
Synod" was an easy one. Already the 
Westminster Confession had been formally 
and sincerely declared to express the doc- 
trinal belief of the New England churches; 
and it is wonderful how little, in an age of 
earnest theological study, had been the de- 
flection from that standard. The very slight 
amendments to that document proposed at 
the Synod of "the Congregational Churches 
of England" at the Savoy in London in 
1658 sufficed to make it representative of 
the singularly unanimous opinions of the 
Massachusetts churches of 1680. It is char- 
acteristic of Congregationalism on both 
sides of the sea, that this "Declaration" 
was intended in "no way to be made use 
of as an imposition upon any." The set- 
ting up of prescribed forms of doctrinal 
statement to which assent should be ex- 
acted, was the device of a later age. 

The " Reforming Synod " was the last of 
the church councils summoned by civil au- 



88 The Congregationalists 

thority in Massachusetts. In the political 
changes of England, the theocratic govern- 
ment of the colony had lapsed and the royal 
governors and their councillors had no mind 
to act as nursing fathers to the churches. 
And yet there were not wanting urgent oc- 
casions for the sort of tutelage which the 
General Court had been wont to exercise. 
An event occurred in Boston in 1699, which 
made an epoch in the history of American 
Congregationalism, and at the time pro- 
foundly grieved and even alarmed those 
who cherished the New England theology 
and polity. A small group of young men 
of high consideration, including some men 
of property, built a new meeting-house 
and organized a fourth Boston church— the 
'* Brattle Church "—announcing at the same 
time, on the one hand, their adherence to 
the doctrinal standards of Cambridge and 
Westminster, and on the other their distinct 
departure from some of the prevailing 
usages of the colony. They desired that 



Reformation and Innovation 89 

the ordeal of a public recital of one's inti- 
mate spiritual experiences should no longer 
be imposed upon candidates for member- 
ship in the church; that not communicants 
only, but all who shared in supporting the 
minister should be allowed a voice in his 
election; that any child might receive bap- 
tism, who should be presented by Christian 
sponsors; and that in the services of public 
worship there might be used the simple 
reading of Scripture without comment, and 
also the Lord's Prayer. These demands, 
formulated in a "Manifesto," were of 
themselves sufficiently startling to the the- 
ologians of the time and place; but the 
mode of procedure in the institution of the 
new church was even more offensive. Re- 
spectfully invoking the fraternal fellowship 
of the neighbor churches, they nevertheless 
effected their organization without advice 
or consent of council. Under the old 
regime, the civil authorities would have 
had somewhat to say in the case; but as 



go The Congregationalists 

things now stood, the Act of Toleration, 
enacted for the relief of dissenters from the 
established Church of England was equally 
a protection to a departure from the ways 
of the established churches of New Eng- 
land. But a still more distinct affront to the 
principles of the fathers was the course 
pursued in the settlement of Benjamin Col- 
man as pastor. He was in England at the 
time, and rather than encounter the exas- 
perated prejudices of the Boston clergy, he 
was advised to procure ordination ''sine 
titulo'' from the Presbytery of London. 
Both the ordination and the assumption of 
office which followed were an open de- 
fiance of the example of the fathers and of 
their principles as enunciated a half-century 
before in the Cambridge Platform. It was 
much to the credit of the Boston churches 
that they could condone such irregularities 
and, with not much delay, receive "the 
Manifesto church " to fellowship. But the 
indignation of conservative men, like the 



Reformation and Innovation 91 

Mathers, father and son, was great. The 
foundations were destroyed, and what 
should the righteous do ? Increase Mather, 
recounting these and other innovations, de- 
clared "if we espouse such principles as 
these, we give away the whole Congrega- 
tional cause at once, and a great part of the 
Presbyterian discipline also." Nevertheless 
the new church took root and flourished. 

In their reasonable fears of a general 
wreck of the church-system planted at 
such cost and attended by so many signs 
of divine blessing, the churches missed the 
salutary constraint and guidance of the 
Christian magistrate, so lately withdrawn. 
In view of the possibilities of disorder that 
loomed before them, it is no wonder that 
serious thoughts arose of what good results 
might follow from a more solid organiza- 
tion of ministers and churches for mutual 
control and supervision. The matter was 
pondered in the several neighborhood meet- 
ings of pastors, and in the general Minis- 



92 The Congregationalists 

ters' Convention at Boston in 1704, and the 
result was a draft of constitution for a 
" consociational " system like what, only 
three years later, was carried into effect in 
Connecticut, under the Saybrook Platform. 
The current of feeling was setting strongly 
in this direction. It is only the tiro in 
church history who will be surprised to 
find in the front rank of this conservative 
reaction the names of some of the leaders 
in the liberal innovations of ''the Manifesto 
church." 

It was only in Connecticut that the con- 
sociational system went into practical 
operation. This colony, happy in its com- 
parative obscurity, had escaped the revolu- 
tion that had overthrown the Massachusetts 
theocracy. Almost unimpaired by foreign 
interference it maintained the popular in- 
stitutions devised by the genius of Thomas 
Hooker. Its legislature still had power, 
and only too ready a will, to exercise its 
episcopal jurisdiction over the churches. 



Reformation and Innovation 93 

This lay body felt, not less keenly than the 
clerical meetings in Massachusetts, the 
perils of the times. Not without cor- 
respondence with the leading ministers of 
the older colony, the General Assembly 
was moved to enact a statute "ordaining 
and requiring " that in each county the 
ministers, with such messengers as the 
churches should see fit to appoint, should 
meet and consider the subject of methods 
of ecclesiastical discipline, and that each of 
these county meetings should send two 
or more delegates to Saybrook, at the next 
Commencement of the infant College, and 
that the synod thus constituted should 
"draw a form of ecclesiastical discipline" 
to be submitted to the legislature for ap- 
proval, at its next session. The result of 
the synod's deliberation was the fifteen 
articles of " The Saybrook Platform." 
This, being submitted to the legislature, 
was eagerly approved, with an ordinance 
that the churches "thus united in doctrine, 



94 The Congregationalists 

worship and discipline be, and for the 
future shall be owned and acknowl- 
edged, established by law." The Platform 
provided for one or more Associations of 
ministers in each county, and that con- 
terminous with the district of each As- 
sociation should be a standing council or 
"Consociation" of churches, in which 
each church should be represented by 
pastor and delegate, and which should take 
judicial cognizance of cases brought before 
it, and "hear and determine" them. Ac- 
cording as its provisions might be con- 
strued rigorously or liberally, the Platform 
would be either tantamount to a Presbyte- 
rian discipline, or would be a methodized 
form of promoting the fraternal fellowship 
of the churches. This divergence of inter- 
pretation was put upon the instrument 
from the beginning. In Fairfield County 
the high-church Presbyterian construction 
prevailed. In the contiguous county of 
New Haven, the Platform was ratified by 



Reformation and Innovation 95 

the representatives of the churches, as a 
means of promoting communion of 
churches, only with express reservation 
of the rights and liberties of the churches. 
The consociation system continued in more 
or less vigorous life for a century and a 
half, though meanwhile the legal sanction 
of it had been repealed. The historical dis- 
course at the one hundreth and fiftieth anni- 
versary of the Synod of Saybrook was spoken 
of by some, at the time, as "the funeral ser- 
mon of the Saybrook Platform." The same 
meeting of the General Association of the 
State witnessed the inception of a system of 
church ** conferences " for mere purposes 
of fellowship and practical evangelization, 
having no governmental function; and by 
these the standing councils of consociation 
have been gradually and generally super- 
seded. 

The current which, at the end of the 
seventeenth century was setting so strong 
towards a more compacted government of 



96 The Congregatlonalists 

the churches, arrived at nothing in Massa- 
chusetts. In Connecticut it created a dis- 
tinct type of Congregationalism, having 
affinities with Presbyterianism, with which 
by and by it was to enter into an alliance 
that should have an important influence on 
the course of American church history. 



CHAPTER VIII 

A DEMOCRATIC REACTION 

The powerful current which, in Massa- 
chusetts, was setting towards confederation 
in church government, bearing on its sur- 
face the most eminent leaders of society, 
did not long flow without encountering a 
more powerful counter-current, or rather 
undertow. 

While the Puritan institutions, in both 
church and state, had been of a notably 
aristocratic character, the whole condition 
of society was tending more and more to- 
wards democracy. This tendency, in the 
Bay Colony, was not hindered but rather 
intensified by the recurring conflict with 
intrusions of court and parliament and 
bishops, and by the arrogance of the petty 
vice-regal court and its adherents of "the 
97 



gS The Congregationalists 

sect of the Herodians." While the Mathers 
and other eminent conservatives were 
planning measures for limiting the sover- 
eignty of the individual church, and for 
confirming the control of the eldership, a 
contrary feeling was growing in the 
popular heart, and was about to come to 
commanding expression. 

John Wise, one of the foremost names in 
American literature of the colonial period, 
was a Protestant of the Protestants. His 
first appearance in history is in the act of 
protesting in the town meeting of Ipswich 
against a tax unlawfully imposed by Gov- 
ernor Andros, a protest so bold and effect- 
ive that the speaker was arrested, deposed 
from his office of pastor, and imprisoned. 
When Andros was overthrown and (in his 
turn) imprisoned, the pastor, now restored 
to his charge, and recognized as a tribune 
of the people, lent a strong hand in the re- 
organization of the government; he was 
chaplain to the colonial troops in Governor 



A Democratic Reaction 99 

Phips's Canada expedition, and proved his 
bravery in the field as well as his prowess 
in debate. This was the man, " the first 
great American democrat," as Prof. Moses 
Coit Tyler has styled him, who boldly 
stepped into the lists, undeterred by the 
supercilious sneers of the great men of his 
time, as champion of the rights of the 
churches and their members. Two little 
books of his were an open challenge to 
generally prevailing views and usages. 
One, published in 17 10, was entitled: 
" The Churches' Quarrel Espoused; or a re- 
ply in satire to certain proposals made in 
answer to this question, What further 
steps " [are to be taken, that the councils 
may have due constitution and efficacy in 
supporting, preserving and well ordering 
the interests of the churches in the coun- 
try] ? "By John Wise, pastor to a church 
in Ipswich." The title of the other book, 
published in 17 17, was: "A Vindication of 
the Government of New England Churches: 



loo The Congregationalists 

drawn from antiquity; the light of nature; 
holy Scripture; its noble nature; and from 
the dignity divine providence has put upon 
it." Critics are agreed in extolling the 
originality, wit, eloquence and power that 
characterize these writings. They deal 
with the foundation principles, not only of 
church government, but of all government, 
declaring "that a democracy in church or 
state is a very honorable and regular gov- 
ernment according to the dictates of right 
reason." They powerfully influenced the 
later development of the New England 
church polity, in the direction both of de- 
mocracy within the church, and independ- 
ence among the churches. And their influ- 
ence on civil affairs was not less notable. 
In 1772, on the eve of the war of independ- 
ence, these rousing defenses of the rights 
of the people were remembered and drawn 
from their oblivion and reprinted in Boston 
in two large editions in that single year. 
But admirable as they are in themselves, 



A Democratic Reaction loi 

there is reason to believe that they were in 
some measure consequence as well as cause 
of the tendency in the popular mind to- 
wards liberty and liberality in church and 
in state. 



CHAPTER IX 

A RETROSPECT 

The eve before the dawn of " The Great 
Awakening" is an epoch from which to 
look backward over the first century of the 
Congregational churches of America. 

The four colonies which in 1643, had 
combined in the first federal union in 
America, were Plymouth, Massachusetts, 
Connecticut and New Haven. These had 
now become merged into two, and within 
the boundaries of these two, Massachusetts 
and Connecticut, the system of Congrega- 
tional churches had had its growth and 
evolution. 

Of the ideals in the minds of the Foun- 
ders of these churches, some had endured 
with persistent vitality. That there should 
be a system of parish churches, every town 



A Retrospect 103 

or precinct of a town having its church 
charged with the oversight of the popula- 
tion, which, in turn, was under obligation 
for the maintenance of the church — this 
was the invaluable contribution to Amer- 
ican civilization from the National Church 
from which the Puritan colonists came 
forth. In both jurisdictions it had been 
maintained almost unimpaired. In excep- 
tional and very rare cases a "poll-parish" 
had been created consisting of individuals 
or families not defined by boundaries, but 
adhering by choice to a certain congrega- 
tion. Provision was granted, grudgingly 
at first, afterwards liberally, for separate 
meetings of dissenters from the parish 
church. 

The purity of the church, which had 
been a leading aim of the colonists in their 
migration into the wilderness, continued to 
be insisted on with a zeal intensified by re- 
membrance of abuses in the parish churches 
of England. The church was to be made 



104 "^^^ Congregationalists 

up of ''visible saints," and must be consti- 
tuted by a mutual covenant. But the 
adoption of impracticable criteria of "vis- 
ible sanctity" had led into difficulties 
which inevitably modified the polity of 
the churches. The notion that one's spir- 
itual state could be diagnosticated by a 
study of the "rational symptoms" in each 
case, led to the exclusion from the privi- 
leges of the church of many who clearly 
ought not to have been excluded, and so to 
the admission of them to a quasi-member- 
ship by a "half-way covenant" the terms 
of which, honestly accepted, implied unre- 
served Christian discipleship. Like con- 
siderations, together with the popular prin- 
ciple, "no taxation without represen- 
tation," led to the organization of the 
"ecclesiastical society" having charge of 
the temporalities of the church, and having 
a vote, conjointly with the church, in the 
election of pastor. 
The refusal, in the first generation, to 



A Retrospect 105 

recognize any such thing as a rank or order 
of ministers other than the officers, for the 
time being, of a congregation; and the 
claim that ordination was merely a form of 
inaugurating such officers into their local 
functions, had faded out. It was coming 
to be understood that one who had been 
ordained to the ministry of one church con- 
tinued thereafter to be regarded in all the 
churches as of ministerial rank. 

The attempt of the Founders to organize 
in every church a presbytery of two teach- 
ing elders and one or more ruling elders, 
had fallen by its own weight and costli- 
ness, and the general usage was one minis- 
ter to each church. Thus the government 
of the congregation, which had been Pres- 
byterian, when the presbytery dwindled to 
one man became virtually episcopal. The 
polity was felt on all hands to be in peril- 
ously unstable equilibrium. An allegiance 
that might be conceded to a representative 
body of three or more, would become most 



io6 The Congregationalists 

precarious when claimed for a single indi- 
vidual. The escape from this situation must 
be either in 'the direction of classical gov- 
ernment, as proposed in Massachusetts and 
effected in Connecticut; or in the rehabili- 
tation of the authority of the people, as 
demanded by Robert Browne 150 years 
before, and now again by John Wise. 

The principle of the fellowship of the 
churches, illustrated from the beginning 
and articulated with emphasis in the Cam- 
bridge Platform, had suffered no decline. 
On the contrary, as the supervision of the 
civil government became relaxed, and di- 
vergencies of sentiment began to appear, 
and here and there a dissenting congrega- 
tion. Baptist or Episcopalian, was formed, 
the need of mutual counsel and concerted 
action in matters of grave moment and 
common concern became the more appar- 
ent. There was a serious divergence of 
method between Massachusetts and Con- 
necticut, one adhering to the early practice 



A Retrospect 107 

of acting by councils strictly occasional, 
dissolving when the occasion ceases, the 
other organizing standing councils within 
definite territories. There were disad- 
vantages in each method; one was liable to 
irregularity, the other trenched upon liberty. 
But there was one form of organization 
that had taken permanent root. The "As- 
sociations " or clubs of neighboring minis- 
ters for mutual improvement had come 
into general -favor and were found to serve 
a useful purpose in introducing and recom- 
mending candidates to the churches, ** for 
the trial of their gifts." By a phrase nat- 
urally borrowed from the Presbyterian vo- 
cabulary, this recommendation, given after 
examination of the candidate's qualifica- 
tions, came to be called a *' license to 
preach." It had no more authority than 
the churches chose to concede to it; and (to 
the credit of their good sense) they com- 
monly conceded very much. 
Thus, in the course of a hundred years, 



io8 The Congregationalists 

there had grown up in these colonies, from 
its roots in the New Testament scriptures, a 
complete ecclesiastical polity. In twenty 
years from the landing at Salem, the great 
Puritan migration had ceased to flow; in 
fact the reflux, it is estimated, carried back 
to England more persons than had originally 
come thence. But their posterity had peo- 
pled the coasts of the two colonies and the 
Connecticut River valley with towns and 
villages, each with its church and its 
"learned and orthodox minister" and its 
school; and at cost of immense sacrifice in 
those days of poverty, two colleges, destined 
to take rank among the famous universities 
of the world, were training young men in 
the higher learning for service in church 
and in civil state. 

The constellation of great men who had 
presided over the birth of these churches 
had long ago sunk below the horizon. 
Hooker, Davenport, Cotton, Eliot, Richard 
Mather, had been succeeded by men of the 



A Retrospect 109 

second and third generations, among whom 
Increase and Cotton Mather of Boston and 
Pierpont of New Haven were eminent. 
The literature of the church had grown 
large, being copiously increased with every 
new question that emerged. The duty of 
preaching the gospel to the heathen In- 
dians, so earnestly laid to heart in the first 
beginnings of settlement, had never been 
neglected. The early endeavors of Roger 
Williams and John Eliot had been supple- 
mented by the labors of many a village pas- 
tor and his church, favored by slender ap- 
propriations from that most ancient of 
Protestant missionary societies founded 
under Oliver Cromwell. 

And here is a curious fact, not without 
parallel in church history: — in these colo- 
nies, ** whose end was religion," where 
every man was a theologian, and the chief 
themes of popular discussion were theolog- 
ical, and the literature was exclusively the- 
ological, and where variations of opinion 



no The Congregationalists 

and divergent tendencies were distinctly as- 
serting themselves, there was nevertheless 
no separation into theological parties. 
Under no constraint, and with apparent 
sincerity, there was general agreement in 
referring to the Westminster Confession as 
slightly amended by the Savoy Synod in 
1658, as expressing the common belief of 
the New England churches. 



CHAPTER X 

GREAT AWAKENING 

The third decade of the eighteenth cen- 
tury closed with the New England churches 
resting under a wide-spread shadow of de- 
pression and discouragement. Fifty years 
before (1680) the '' Reforming Synod" had 
testified to a like depression; and its warn- 
ing and exhortation and the *' mighty cry " 
for divine help to which it had stirred up 
the people had not been in vain. There 
had been signs of renewed life; but the 
torpor had come back over the churches 
"as the clouds return after the rain." We 
have not to seek far to find causes for the 
spiritual declension. The fifty years past 
had been years of almost incessant war 
with the Indians, and of political agitation 
in Massachusetts. The frequent and some- 



1 1 2 The Congregationalists 

times acrimonious controversies over church 
questions were not usually means of grace. 
But it is common to lay the chief blame for 
the declension on the general adoption of 
the ** half-v^ay covenant." The real blame 
was due to the defective practical theology 
that necessitated the half-way covenant. 
The notion that persons freely and unre- 
servedly pledged to every duty of Christian 
discipleship should be debarred from the 
communion of the church simply for lack 
of a certain passive experience confessedly 
beyond their power to attain was a notion 
self-condemned before honest consciences. 
To admit these persons grudgingly to a 
** half-way " membership that should em- 
power them to present their children for 
baptism, did not solve the difficulty. The 
real solution lay in recognizing that a will- 
ing heart for all the will of Christ was itself 
a divine gift and an evidence of regener- 
ation. The fault of the time was not in re- 
ceiving such to ** half-way" membership. 



Great Awakening 113 

but in not welcoming them to full com- 
munion. The dullness and coldness of the 
churches is often ascribed to the admission 
of so many as " proselytes of the gate " to 
a quasi-membership. It might have been 
in some measure happily relieved by open- 
ing the gate and admitting them to the re- 
sponsibilities and privileges of brethren. 

So thought Solomon Stoddard, whose 
frontier parish of Northampton, on the 
Connecticut River, was destined to become 
a central point of interest in the history of 
these times. His is a name not to be men- 
tioned without respect and even reverence. 
Born in Boston in 1643, graduated at Har- 
vard in 1662, and afterwards serving there 
as tutor and librarian, he became minister 
of Northampton in 1669, and there re- 
mained for sixty honored and fruitful years. 
His great dignity and holiness of character 
added power to his earnest preaching; in a 
time when the churches generally were 
languishing, his ministry was marked by 



114 The Congregationalists 

no less than five revivals. From such a 
man, a protest against excessive rigor in 
church administration came with peculiar 
weight. It is well to remember that it was 
in the year of his graduation at Harvard 
that the great synod was held at Boston, at 
which seventy "elders and messengers" of 
the churches did, "after much discussion 
and consideration from the Word of God," 
vote and conclude in favor of the Half-way 
Covenant. He was no novice, but a ma- 
ture scholar of fifty-seven years, and a pas- 
tor for thirty-one successful years, when he 
published, in 1700, his "Doctrine of Insti- 
tuted Churches." This was followed, nine 
years later, after not a little controversy, by 
his "Appeal to the Learned; being a vindi- 
cation of the right of visible saints to the 
Lord's Supper, though they be destitute of 
a saving work of God's Spirit on their 
hearts." It requires an effort for us to ap- 
prehend the idea that sounds so paradox- 
ical, of "visible saints " in "an unconverted 



Great Awakening 115 

condition." We may be aided by reading 
one of the forms of this " half-way cove- 
nanting " in use in a Boston church: 

You now from your heart professing a 
serious belief of the Christian religion, as it 
has generally been declared and embraced 
by the faithful in this place, do here give up 
yourself to God in Christ, promising with 
his help to endeavor to walk according to 
the rules of that holy religion all your days; 
choosing of God as your best good and 
your last end, and Christ as the Prophet and 
Priest and King of your soul forever. You 
do therefore submit unto the laws of his 
kingdom as they are administered in this 
church of his; and you will also carefully 
and sincerely labor after those more positive 
and increased evidences of regeneration 
which may further encourage you to seek 
an admission unto the table of the Lord. 

There are few pastors at the present day 
who are not so far "Stoddardean" but that 
they would eagerly admit that one who 
could take this covenant intelligently and 
sincerely ought at once to be welcomed to 
the full communion of the church. One 
who would take it otherwise than sincerely, 



ll6 The Congregationalists 

ought not to be permitted to take it at 
all. 

It grows clear, as we read, that the fa- 
thers of the New England churches, in their 
righteous reaction from the scandalous cor- 
ruptness of the English parish churches, had 
set up an ultra-scriptural standard of church- 
membership, the consequences of which, in 
the third and fourth generations, were 
plaguing their successors. Their "plat- 
forms" and other manifestoes bristled with 
proof-texts and biblical phrases in italic 
type. But in their overzeal for church 
purity they had failed to put due emphasis 
on the parable of The Tares of the Field. 
They were bent upon keeping out the tares, 
at whatever risk to the wheat; and they had 
fixed a criterion of regenerate character, 
which might seem to serve, in an age of 
deep emotions, but failed in calmer times. 
The exacting of a recital of intimate spirit- 
ual experiences neither spared the wheat 
nor rooted out all the tares. Instead of 



Great Awakening 117 

frankly abandoning it in favor of some 
more scriptural criterion, like ** He that 
doeth righteousness is righteous," or ** By 
their fruits ye shall know them," they clung 
to their "tradition of the elders" with the 
illogical and mischievous compromise, that 
one who was not prepared to pass their 
arbitrary ** fencing of the table" might 
come halfway. The doctrine of Stoddard, 
instead of a further decline from the half- 
way covenant, was really, under an infe- 
licitous statement, a return to sound prin- 
ciples. 

As the sixty-years' pastorate of Stoddard 
drew towards its close, the church and 
parish of Northampton were sharing the 
generally prevalent inertness. High hopes 
were awakened when, in 1727, the grand- 
son of the aged pastor was ordained as a 
colleague. Well might good men be hope- 
ful at the coming of a young man of such 
rare promise as this Jonathan Edwards. In 
his home at the parsonage at East Windsor, 



li8 The Congregationalists 

Connecticut, and in his boyhood at Yale 
College, where he graduated at seventeen, 
he had already manifested traits of genius 
in philosophy and of holiness in character 
which called forth the admiring question. 
What manner of man shall this be ? After 
two years from his graduation passed at 
New Haven in theological study, he spent 
a few months in New York as minister to 
the feeble Presbyterian congregation lately 
gathered there, and then returned to Yale 
to serve for two years as tutor. Here, at 
her home in the New Haven parsonage, he 
won the love of Sarah Pierpont, a woman 
worthy of himself. The little prose-poem 
in which he describes to himself the 
spiritual beauties of her character is one of 
the points of the striking parallel between 
Edwards and Dante. The great Floren- 
tine's description of his Beatrice is not 
more tenderly beautiful. Edwards was 
twenty-four years old when he was or- 
dained pastor of the Northampton church. 



Great Awakening iig 

When, a few months later, he installed his 
"espoused saint" in the parsonage at 
Northampton, the house became a well- 
spring of spiritual influences for the whole 
nation, the streams of which have never 
ceased to flow. 

The newly inaugurated ministry made 
no break in the traditions of the church. 
Even the death of the venerable Stoddard, 
two years after he had laid his hands on 
the head of his grandson, does not seem to 
have led to any departure from his methods. 
It would have been little accordant with the 
mind of the young pastor, to refuse to any 
the comfort and help of the holy supper, 
on the ground of their non-compliance with 
conditions with which it was in no sense 
possible for them to comply. For six 
years his preaching of righteousness 
seemed as a voice crying in the wilderness. 
At length the faith and prayer of the 
preacher were rewarded by some signs of 
yielding to the word of God. The frivolity 



120 The Congregationalists 

or wantonness of the youth, that had vexed 
his righteous soul, began to be sobered. 
With deepening fervor he urged -upon 
men's hearts the familiar themes, justifica- 
tion by faith, the awfulness of God's 
justice, the excellency of Christ, the duty 
of pressing into the kingdom of God. 
Presently a young woman, a leader in the 
village gayeties, became ''serious, giving 
evidence of a heart truly broken and 
sanctified." It was the beginning of " The 
Great Awakening." The story of the 
revival cannot be better told than in the 
language of Edwards himself: 

The work of God, as it was carried on 
and the number of true saints multiplied, 
soon made a glorious alteration in the 
town, so that in the spring and summer, 
anno 1735, the town seemed to be full of 
the presence of God. It was never so full 
of love nor so full of joy, and yet so full 
of distress, as it was then. There were 
remarkable tokens of God's presence in 
almost every house. It was a time of joy 
in families on the account of salvation's be- 
ing brought unto them; parents rejoicing 



Great Awakening 121 

over their children as being new-born, and 
husbands over their wives and wives over 
their husbands. The goings of God were 
then seen in his sanctuary. God's day was 
a dehght, and his tabernacles were amiable. 
Our public assemblies were then beautiful; 
the congregation was alive in God's service, 
every one intent on the public worship, 
every hearer eager to drink in the words of 
the minister as they came from his mouth; 
the assembly in general were from time to 
time in tears while the Word was preached, 
some weeping with sorrow and distress, 
others with joy and love, others with pity 
and concern for the souls of their neigh- 
bors. 



But the crown and glory of the work 
was when the thankful people presented 
themselves before the Lord with solemn 
acts of thanksgiving and vows of purity 
and faithfulness and charity in all the duties 
of daily life. By public covenant they con- 
secrated themselves to the relative duties of 
parents and children, husbands and wives, 
brothers and sisters, masters, mistresses 
and servants. 



122 The Congregationalists 

The work spread abroad through all the 
Connecticut Valley and the region round 
about. It was heard of in the region of 
Newark, planted by a New England colony, 
and of Elizabeth, where Jonathan Dickin- 
son, a native of Hatfield, next town to 
Northampton, was the foremost man of 
New Jersey Presbyterianism; and the news, 
as it spread, quickened the churches with 
new life. Dr. Benjamin Colman of Boston 
wrote to Edwards for the facts in the case; 
and his reply, forwarded to Dr. Watts and 
Dr. Guyse, was published by them in Lon- 
don under the title, "Narrative of Surpris- 
ing Conversions." The little book, carried 
by John Wesley in his pocket on a walk 
from London to Oxford, in 1738, opened 
his eyes to the vision of new possibilities 
for the kingdom of God. "Surely," he 
writes, "this is the Lord's doing, and it is 
marvellous in our eyes." That same year 
George Whitefield sailed for Georgia, to 
take up the work, in that infant colony, in 



Great Awakening 123 

which his college friend, Wesley, had 
made so painful a failure. 

The waters that had been stirred as by an 
angel did not return to their long wonted 
stagnation. Through the long seaboard 
from Maine to Georgia, there was a stir of 
expectant hope. In the autumn of 1740, on 
the invitation of Colman, Whitefield made 
a rapid progress through New England, 
preaching at every halt, spending three 
days at Newport, a fortnight in Boston, and 
three days at New Haven, and a few hours 
each at many other places. Never did 
apostle more literally fulfill the command, 
''as ye go, preach." And wherever he 
preached, he was thronged by eager, agi- 
tated, sometimes weeping and fainting con- 
gregations. No heart, it seemed, could 
resist the power of his incomparable 
eloquence. And yet some of those who 
*' esteemed him most highly in love for his 
work's sake " recognized, with misgivings, 
the personal faults and the mistakes by 



124 The Congregationalists 

which his work was marred. His good 
sense and modesty were not proof against 
the adulations that everywhere waited on 
him. He was superstitiously inclined to be 
governed in his conduct by "impressions " 
assumed to be divine. He was prone to 
** beating his fellow-servants," his excessive 
self-conceit taking its common form of 
censoriousness in the judgment of others. 
He was much addicted to inveighing 
against other ministers as "unconverted," 
declaring in Boston, before a great as- 
sembly including many ministers, that 
" the generality of preachers talk of an un- 
known and unfelt Christ; and the reason 
why congregations have been so dead is 
because they have had dead men preaching 
to them." These were faults that were not 
slow in bringing their penalty. Imitated 
with aggravations by some of the asso- 
ciates and followers of the great preacher, 
who found it easier to copy his faults than 
his inimitable gifts, to what could they lead 



Great Awakening 125 

but to disorder ? Following close upon 
Whitefield's flying tour through New Eng- 
land, came Gilbert Tennent of New Jersey, 
whose abusive sermon on "An Uncon- 
verted Ministry " had just split the Presby- 
terian Church into two synods, of the Old 
Side and the New Side — a schism that was 
long in healing. The hysterical agitations, 
such as the sober wisdom of Edwards 
sought to hold under control, suffered no 
abatement under the fervid harangues of 
Tennent. For several months in the winter 
and spring of 1741, he continued his work 
at Boston, sustained by the confidence of 
some of the best men of the clergy. In 
Connecticut, several zealous pastors left 
their parishes for evangelizing tours from 
town to town, not waiting for invitations 
from the pastor in charge, but invading 
other men's parishes at their own discre- 
tion. It was impossible that such pro- 
cedures, however conscientiously under- 
taken, should fail of giving offense. The 



126 The Congregationalists 

colonial legislature, which had ever an 
alacrity at meddling with church affairs, in 
1741 summoned a " General Consociation " 
— the last Congregational Synod called by 
civil authority — to consult for "the true in- 
terest of vital religion." This council pro- 
nounced the opinion that no minister ought 
to preach or administer the sacraments in a 
parish not his own, without the consent of 
the settled minister of the parish. So ob- 
vious a principle of good manners failed to 
restrain the zeal of the itinerants; and the 
legislature followed it up with a law that 
a pastor leaving his flock to intrude un- 
invited into his neighbor's should lose his 
legal right to collect his salary, and be 
liable to be put under bonds for good be- 
havior. Intruders from outside of the 
colony were liable to be expelled from 
within its borders. 

Admitting (what at this day would be 
generally denied) the right of the govern- 
ment to interfere at all in such matters, it is 



Great Awakening 127 

not difficult to find justification for the 
course that was taken by the legislature. 
If there was any value in the organization 
of the state into parishes each with its 
church and minister responsible for the care 
of its people, something must be done to 
prevent the parish system, inherited from 
the fathers, from being broken down by 
headstrong zealots breaking bounds at no 
call but that of an " impression " alleged to 
be divine. It was the mildest penalty that 
the case admitted, to signify to one quitting 
his own parish on a self-appointed mission 
to other men's parishes, that he must cease 
thereby to draw a salary for the work that 
he had ceased to do at homa If they 
should invade the parish of a neighbor min- 
ister with the implication or (as oftener 
happened) with the very explicit denunci- 
ation that he was a blind leader of the blind, 
it was not imposing an intolerable hardship 
that they should be required to give se- 
curity for their decent and orderly conduct. 



128 The Congregationalists 

As for evangelists from abroad, their wel- 
come had been so eager and so general, 
that the fact that one failed of being in- 
vited by some pastor would furnish a pre- 
sumption against him as an adventurer not 
to be encouraged or entertained. 

Evidently the new gospel was bringing 
not peace but a sword. In the controversy 
that was inevitably springing up, two pro- 
tagonists were conspicuous. The work of 
Jonathan Edwards, "Some Thoughts con- 
cerning the present Revival of Religion in 
New England" (Boston, 1742) was an- 
swered the next year by Charles Chauncy, 
pastor of the First Church in Boston, in a 
volume the title of which bore a purposed 
resemblance to that which Edwards had 
used — " Seasonable Thoughts on the State 
of Religion in New England." It included 
widely collected and carefully authenticated 
instances of extravagance and fanaticism 
in the progress of the revival, with serious 
warnings of impending danger to the 



Great Awakening 129 

churches. The debate entered into the 
conventions of ministers and into the disci- 
pline of colleges. It was at this time that 
David Brainerd was expelled from Yale 
College for indulging himself in the be- 
setting sin of the revivalists, and saying of 
Tutor Whittelsey (a man of high Christian 
character, afterwards pastor of the New 
Haven church) " he has no more grace than 
this chair." The objectors to the methods 
of the "New Lights" were powerfully re- 
inforced by the growing indiscretions of 
the itinerants. James Davenport, pastor at 
Southold, Long Island, was one of White- 
field's prime favorites. Surrendering him- 
self to the control of "impressions" and 
"impulses" and Bible phrases "borne in 
upon his mind," he abandoned his Long 
Island parish, and went crusading through 
Connecticut and Massachusetts, thrusting 
himself uninvited into other men's labors, 
charging those who opposed him with 
being "unconverted" and with "leading 



130 The Congregationalists 

their people blindfold to hell," and adjuring 
the people to desert both pastor and church. 
Intent on schism, he came by invitation to 
New London to aid in organizing a Sepa- 
ratist church, and there "published the 
messages which he said he received from 
the Spirit in dreams and otherwise" and 
summoned the people with a "Thus 
saith the Lord" to put away the ob- 
jects of their idolatry. Wigs, cloaks and 
breeches, hoods, gowns, rings, jewels 
and necklaces, were laid in a heap, on a 
Sunday afternoon, and publicly burned, 
with songs and shouts. In the pile were 
devotional books of such authors as Flavel, 
Beveridge and Increase Mather, and it was 
proclaimed to the crowd that "the smoke 
of the torment of such of the authors of the 
above-said books as died in the same belief 
as when they set them out was now as- 
cending in hell, in like manner as they saw 
the smoke of these books arise." Such ex- 
travagances wrought a reaction and cured 



Great Awakening 131 

themselves. In a little more than a year 
from this time, Davenport himself, who 
had been treated with much forbearance as 
not responsible for his actions, recovered 
his reason, with the restoration of his bodily 
health, and published a pathetic acknowl- 
edgment that he had been under the influ- 
ence of a spirit of delusion which he had 
mistaken for the Spirit of truth. Men set- 
tled down into a more sober mind. Good 
men had been widely sundered in senti- 
ment; and yet, on reconsideration, the 
difference was not extreme. The most 
zealous revivalists admitted that there had 
been deplorable excesses; the most cau- 
tious conservatives recognized that benefi- 
cent and divine work had been wrought. 
The hearts of alienated brethren flowed to- 
gether, and soon no trace remained of the 
storm that had swept over New England, 
except a few languishing schisms in Con- 
necticut country towns. Nevertheless the 
severe strain had revealed the fact of diverse 



132 The Congregationalists 

tendencies in opinion and taste and spiritual 
temperament, which were destined to have 
a most serious influence on the course of 
later history. Some of the lessons taught 
by the now subsided agitation were in- 
structive to students of church polity. The 
most serious disorders had prevailed in re- 
gions where the semi-Presbyterian arrange- 
ments of the Saybrook Platform were 
looked to as a bulwark of good order. 
And the gravest schism that the Great 
Awakening occasioned — a complete rupture 
between "Old Side" and "New Side" 
that continued unhealed for eighteen years 
— took place under the compact classical 
government of the Presbyterian Church. 
In the looser tissue of the Congregational 
communion, the wounds healed by the first 
intention. 



CHAPTER XI 

GROWTH OF DOCTRINE 

In the strength of the refreshment re- 
ceived in the few years of the Great Awak- 
ening, the churches of New England were 
to subsist for more than forty years. These 
were to be years not only of reaction from 
profound agitation and excitement, but also 
of exhausting wars, of political turmoil, 
and of the influx of anti-religious principles 
from abroad. But for the new and more 
abundant life that had been infused into 
them, the very existence of the churches 
might have been imperiled by these malign 
influences. 

But they were not unfruitful years. The 
fervid missionary zeal of David Brainerd, 
commemorated in his biography by Jona- 
than Edwards, inspired with like zeal 
^33 



134 The Congregationalists 

Henry Martyn and a great company of men 
and women like-minded, on both sides of 
the sea. The faithfulness of many a parish 
church was rewarded by the ingathering of 
Indian converts. One of these, Samson 
Occum, educated for the ministry by Pastor 
Wheelock of Lebanon, gathered in England 
funds for that school for the training of 
Indian preachers which grew into Dart- 
mouth College. In the twenty years from 
1740, the number of the New England 
churches had been increased by one hun- 
dred and fifty. 

Among the fruits of the Great Awaken- 
ing must be reckoned that profound stirring 
of intellectual life that added to the Amer- 
ican church polity which had grown up on 
the soil of New England, a distinctly Amer- 
ican school of theology. It is most remark- 
able that in more than a hundred years of 
strenuous theologizing, among a people 
greatly addicted to free thought and speech, 
there should have been so little deviation 



Growth of Doctrine 135 

from the Reformed theology as articulated 
in the Westminster standards. But the re- 
vival had forced the adjudication of some 
questions with which these documents did 
not adequately deal. The Half-way Cove- 
nant and the " Stoddardean " discipline 
were illogical evasions of a difficulty that 
refused to be thus disposed of. They were 
an admission that conditions of salvation 
were exacted with which it was impossible 
to comply. The case required a new the- 
odicy to "justify the ways of God to men." 
It was to this that the great founder of the 
New England theology, Edwards, applied 
those intellectual powers which have been 
the admiration of the world of thinkers and 
scholars. Not without mature meditation 
did he apply in practice the fruits of his 
study. For nearly twenty years he prac- 
tised the system introduced into the North- 
ampton church by his grandfather. Not 
until 1748 did he deliver his soul of a bold 
and open protest against any compromise 



136 The Congregationalists 

of the divine claim of repentance and faith 
as the inexorable condition of acceptance 
with God. To his mind and that of his 
successors, the solution of the "conflict of 
ages" was to be found in alleging the 
"power of contrary choice" and the dis- 
tinction between natural and moral inabil- 
ity. Nothing but a deep conviction of the 
personal guilt of every man who should 
fail to comply with the demands of the 
gospel could possibly have sustained the 
soul of this most conscientious man in 
those lurid and Dantesque denunciations of 
divine vengeance against the impenitent 
and unbelieving with which he terrified the 
shrieking listeners in his Enfield sermon on 
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." 
The subject of human duty, ability and re- 
sponsibility cannot be followed far without 
opening, at the right hand and the left, into 
all the subjects of theological discussion. 
The themes of Edwards's own speculation 
ranged from heaven to hell. His disciples 



Growth of Doctrine 137 

and successors, a numerous series even 
counting only the most eminent, were 
linked together, from generation to genera- 
tion, not only by the bond between teacher 
and scholar, but to a curious degree by the 
ties of family relation. The foremost of 
them, Hopkins and Bellamy, had been stu- 
dents in tne family of Edwards. Smalley 
and Jonathan Edwards the younger were 
among the many students with Bellamy. 
Emmons studied under Smalley. Timothy 
Dwight was grandson of Edwards. Taylor 
was a favorite pupil of Dwight. Park was 
for a time a student of Emmons. The 
questions intently studied in one generation 
were taken up in the next for further elab- 
oration. Thus grew up that body of litera- 
ture known in America as the New England 
theology, and known and widely honored 
and accepted in other lands as the American 
theology. 

Of course this great intellectual move- 
ment was not accomplished without colli- 



138 The Congregationalists 

sion of opposing minds. Serious and some- 
times acrimonious debates took place. Not 
many were called to submit to so painful 
an experience as that of the great Jonathan 
Edwards. His resolute refusal to abate the 
conditions which he deemed scriptural and 
right in receiving candidates to the Lord's 
Supper provoked an angry hostility to him 
in the town to which his more than twenty 
years of ministry had been so noble a dis- 
tinction and so great a blessing. Sorrow- 
fully he laid down his work at the demand 
of a council ratified by an overwhelming 
vote of the church, and with his wife and 
eight of his living children withdrew to the 
perilous frontier of civilization in the Berk- 
shire hills, where he served as missionary to 
the Stockbridge Indians. In this wilderness 
he wrote some of his masterpieces of meta- 
physical divinity. After seven years he was 
invited to be president of Princeton College, 
then lately founded by New England and 
"New Light" influence, in the interest of a 



Growth of Doctrine 139 

more advanced theology and a larger "lib- 
erty of prophesying " than were encouraged 
by the conservative orthodoxy of Harvard 
and Yale. Only a few weeks after his ar- 
rival at Princeton, he entered the pest-house 
to submit himself to inoculation for the 
smallpox, and there died in 1758, in his 
fifty-fifth year. 



CHAPTER XII 

AGE OF HOME MISSIONS 

At the close of the war of independence, 
of all the colonial church establishments the 
only ones that survived in health and vigor 
were those of the Congregational polity. 
The Dutch and afterwards the English 
church in New York languished. Quaker- 
ism, in the Jerseys and Pennsylvania, was 
declining. The Anglican establishments 
from Maryland southward were as good as 
dead. In New England the solid organiza- 
tion of parish churches was coextensive 
with the settled population, and was still 
extending, as new regions came to be occu- 
pied. In the lapse of a century and a half, 
there had been changes in the order of the 
church polity. The early idea of the gov- 
ernment of each church by an elective elder- 
140 



Age of Home Missions 141 

ship of not less than three had shrunk to an 
eldership of one, who was prone to arrogate 
to himself autocratic power. The purely 
democratic government of the towns, and 
the powerful current of popular opinion, 
aided the inevitable reaction towards gov- 
ernment directly by the brotherhood of the 
church. The duties of the fellowship of 
churches, though sometimes conspicuously 
neglected, were so far from being laid aside, 
that they were defined and regulated by a 
growing body of precedents like a common 
law; or (in Connecticut) by a "platform" 
of ordinances — an infraction of the sover- 
eignty of the individual congregation which 
some considered a less evil than the " un- 
chartered freedom " that sometimes perpetu- 
ated a diificulty by setting up council against 
council. Successive controversies had 
arisen, resulting in some cases in there 
being two churches in the same town repre- 
senting different sentiments or tastes ; but 
it does not appear that churches had yet 



142 The Congregationalists 

begun to be established with the distinct 
intent of excluding some fellow-Christians. 
Doubtless (and not unreasonably) a candi- 
date's ''soundness in doctrine" was in- 
quired into as being one of the indications 
of his fitness for membership in the church; 
but it was not with the purpose of making 
separations among Christians, but as one 
way of distinguishing between the church 
and the world. If a candidate, departing 
from what was considered (however mis- 
takenly) as essential and fundamental truth, 
should express Arminian opinions, he might 
very probably be debarred from the com- 
munion; but it would not be with the no- 
tion that he might be an excellent Christian, 
only better suited to some ** sister church," 
but rather that a man holding such views 
was no Christian at all; and that since (to 
quote the title of a pamphlet of the day) 
"heaven is shut against Arminians," it is no 
wrong if the church on earth is shut against 
them too, until they amend their sinful 



Age of Home Missions 143 

errors. In short, the ideal of the New Eng- 
land churches (however imperfectly real- 
ized) was to be parish churches, each com- 
prehending the Christian disciples of its 
parish. In theory and design, at least, they 
were not sectarian. 

Here and there was a congregation of 
dissenters from the parish church. It is 
wonderful how few and inconsiderable they 
were — chiefly Quaker, Baptist and Episco- 
palian. The Separatist congregations or- 
ganized during the commotion of the Great 
Awakening presently adopted Baptist prin- 
ciples, or coalesced harmoniously with the 
sisterhood of the Congregational churches 
about them. Naturally the organization of 
dissent led on both sides to the emphasizing 
of mutual distinctions, and to controversies 
which did not always do more harm than 
good. 

In the extreme languor of the churches 
that followed the war of independence, they 
were providentially laden with a task of su- 



144 The Congregationalists 

preme importance, difficulty and dignity, 
well fitted to exercise all their remaining 
strength. The outward flow of the New 
England population had already begun, be- 
fore the war, and there had been consulta- 
tion among the Connecticut pastors about 
making provision for the ''Green Mountain 
Boys" who were building their pioneer 
cabins in the wildernesses of Vermont. 
Immediately on the conclusion of peace, the 
business was resumed, the evangelizing 
tours of individual pastors being reinforced 
by and by with considerable companies, in- 
cluding some of the foremost men of the 
Connecticut clergy, detailed to this duty by 
the General Association. 

In the adjustment of territorial claims 
arising out of the terms of the colonial 
charters, there had been allowed a Massa- 
chusetts Reserve in Western New York, and 
a Connecticut Reserve stretching across 
Northern Ohio; and towards these regions 
the first tidal wave of westward migration 



Age of Home Missions 145 

was naturally determined. It presently 
grew to such dimensions that more system- 
atic methods for more continuous work 
were demanded. In 1798 was organized 
the Missionary Society of Connecticut, "to 
Christianize the heathen of North America, 
and to support and promote Christian 
knowledge in the new settlements within 
the United States." This example was fol- 
lowed the next year in Massachusetts, and 
a few years later in New Hampshire, Ver- 
mont and Maine. The work thus organized 
was immediately occasioned by the move- 
ment of population; it was both effect and 
cause of that divine work of spiritual quick- 
ening at the opening of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, which has been characterized as The 
Second Awakening. Its influence extended 
from the seaboard to the remotest frontier 
of civilization, '*and there was nothing hid 
from the heat thereof." In the ruder re- 
gions of the West, it was attended by ex- 
travagant symptoms of epidemic nervous 



146 The Congregatlonalists 

excitement. In New England the lessons 
painfully taught, two generations before, by 
the frenzy of poor James Davenport and his 
associates had not been forgotten. The 
people had well learned the apostolic dis- 
tinction between godliness and bodily exer- 
cise. But everywhere the new revival was 
like life from the dead. At the accession of 
Timothy D wight, in 1795, to the presidency 
of Yale College, demoralization and infidel- 
ity, in that institution, had reached nearly 
its lowest limit. The college church was 
almost extinct, and the students generally 
were ostentatiously infidel. As this declen- 
sion was typical of the country generally, so 
was the recovery from it. There is an im- 
pressive absence from the story, of famous 
evangelists traversing the country on tours 
of preaching; everywhere men who had 
been " waiting for the consolation of Israel " 
were quick to answer to the first signs of 
new life. It was wonderful how soon and 
how completely the losses of the church 



Age of Home Missions 147 

were made good. As the Great Awaken- 
ing had been marked by the first American 
venture in religious journalism (the "Chris- 
tian History" of Thomas Prince) so the 
present awakening of missionary zeal gave 
birth to the Connecticut Evangelical Maga- 
:(ine (1800) and the Massachusetts Mis- 
sionary Magazine (1802). The generous 
enthusiasm of religious activity was destined 
to have the most important results, both 
direct and indirect, on the future of the 
Congregational churches of America. 

The task imposed upon the churches of 
this period was notably different from that 
borne by the former generations. It was no 
longer that of tending the infancy of homo- 
geneous communities on their own soil, un- 
der the tutelage of their own government, 
and of seeing them equipped with the insti- 
tutions of a Christian civilization. Their 
brethren and neighbors, embarking in their 
canvas-covered wagons, had gone further 
from home, so far as concerned means of 



148 The Congregationalists 

communication, than the fathers who had 
crossed the sea to be the founders of a new 
nation. And in their new wilderness they 
were not alone. Another stream of migra- 
tion was flowing westward on parallel 
lines, and often debouching into the same 
channels with that from New England. 
This was the Scotch or Irish Presbyterian 
migration, so nearly similar to the New 
Englanders, but not identical. These emi- 
grants also were followed into the wilder- 
ness by the pastoral care of missionaries of 
their own sort. 

In these circumstances there were three 
possible courses to be taken: either one 
party or the other might surrender its pref- 
erences and accept the regimen of the 
other; or the two parties might set up rival 
churches in the same village; or some plan 
might be formed by which, in the same com- 
munity, they might agree in common wor- 
ship and Christian service. Many influences 
tended to this last course. In colonial days. 



Age of Home Missions 149 

there had been systematic consultation be- 
tween the Presbyterian Church (then a small 
and uninfluential body) and the General As- 
sociation of Connecticut, regarding meas- 
ures to be taken to ward otT the very real 
and formidable danger that a hierarchy of 
lord-bishops backed by the canon law — a 
yoke which neither they nor their fathers 
had been able to bear — would be imposed 
upon the colonies by crown and parliament. 
After the close of the war of independence, 
the General Assembly had gladly availed 
itself of the eminent qualifications of Dr. 
Dwight to secure a book of psalms and 
hymns suited to churches of both com- 
munions. To a remarkable extent their 
clergy had been manned from New Eng- 
land. The Association and the Assembly 
were in the habit annually of exchanging 
delegates; and at the Assembly's request 
these " corresponding members " were 
given, in each body, equal power with its 
own members. So it came to pass, in 1800, 



l^o The Congregationalists 

that Jonathan Edwards the younger, a theo- 
logian hardly inferior to his illustrious father, 
long a Connecticut pastor, and now presi- 
dent of Union College at Schenectady, was 
sitting in the General Association of Con- 
necticut as delegate of the General Assem- 
bly of the Presbyterian Church. He was a 
representative of both parties, or rather a 
representative of those interests of the 
kingdom of Christ in the West which were 
the common concern of both parties. He 
served on a committee to prepare a " plan 
of union" on which mixed communities 
of Congregationalists and Presbyterians 
might carry on their church affairs together 
without schism. The next year in May, 
he was chairman of a like committee 
in the General Assembly. His report 
was adopted; and the next month it 
was also adopted in Connecticut. This was 
*'The Plan of Union." It provided that a 
Presbyterian church might be served by a 
Congregational minister, and vice versa, and 



Age of Home Missions 151 

that a congregation including members of 
each persuasion mighit conduct its affairs by 
means of a standing committee. It was a 
studiously equitable arrangement, the prac- 
tical value of which in advancing the Chris- 
tianization of the new States is denied by 
none. It saved many a community from 
being ravaged by schism. It greatly honored 
the essential principle of Congregationalism, 
to wit, that a community of Christians has 
a right to manage its own affairs even 
though it may see fit to manage them in the 
Presbyterian way; at the same time it dis- 
allowed the Separatist claim of the right of 
a party to rend itself from the community 
when affairs are not managed according to 
its own mind. And it largely infused the 
spirit of self-respect and self-government 
into many congregations included under the 
Presbyterian hierarchy, and influenced the 
American development of the system itself. 

But the practical working of the Plan of 
Union was to attach a very large propor- 



152 The Congregationalists 

tion, not only of the mixed congregations 
but of those made up mainly from New 
England, to the Presbyterian Church. The 
reasons for this were not far to seek. To 
begin with, the Congregationalists of that 
day had no aversion to the Presbyterian 
polity. The ministers of Connecticut, or- 
ganized on the Saybrook Platform, openly de- 
clared, and with much justice, that their sys- 
tem was rather Presbyterian than Congrega- 
tional; and the purpose of the most emi- 
nent of the Massachusetts clergy to estab- 
lish a like system there had been averted 
only by the fiery appeal of John Wise to 
the growing spirit of democracy and inde- 
pendence. Further, the methods of the 
Presbyterian advance, in which the presby- 
tery is logically antecedent to the congrega- 
tion, gave much advantage, in priority of 
organization, over the method which begins 
with the congregation, leaving the wider 
organization to follow at its convenience. 
The missionaries from New England found 



Age of Home Missions 153 

at hand opportunities of fraternal fellowship 
in the presbytery, and were often content 
to remain in it. Withal, the organization 
of civil government, in the earlier West, on 
the county as a unit, instead of the pure 
democracy of the town-meeting, naturally 
tended to the analogous organization of the 
church. But above all these reasons it 
would be unjust not to commemorate with 
due honor the generous magnanimity with 
which the pilgrims of this new exodus, 
pastors and people alike, consented to sacri- 
fice personal preferences and cherished 
usages and traditions, to the interests of the 
kingdom of heaven. 

It has been estimated that "the Plan of 
Union has transformed over two thousand 
churches which were in origin and usages 
Congregational, into Presbyterian churches." 
One's judgment of the policy that had such 
a result will naturally be affected by his 
point of view. To the zealous propagan- 
dist, eager to belong to a big sect, it must 



154 The Congregationalists 

seem nothing less than "disastrous" — the 
work of "the Lord's silly people." Others 
will reckon it among the highest honors of 
a sect which in many ways has been nobly 
distinguished in the service of the Church 
Catholic, that it was capable of so heroic an 
act of self-abnegation. There are some 
competitions in which the honors and the 
ultimate rewards of victory belong to the 
defeated party. 



CHAPTER XIII 

DISRUPTION 

Simultaneously with these widely exten- 
sive labors of the Congregationalists outside 
of New England, revolutionary agitations 
and changes were taking place among the 
churches in the most ancient seats of our 
Puritan and Pilgrim Christianity. And the 
immediate occasion of these agitations was 
found in that same revival of religion which 
had inspired the apostolic self-denial and 
the earnest missionary zeal manifested in 
the pioneer work at the West. The diver- 
gent tendencies that had revealed themselves 
during and after the Great Awakening, in the 
controversy in which Jonathan Edwards and 
Charles Chauncy were the protagonists, re- 
appeared with emphasis. They represented 
the difference of temperament and taste be- 
155 



156 The Congregationalists 

tween the more eager and zealous, and the 
more sober and critical but not necessarily 
less earnest. They represented a difference 
of judgment in church administration, es- 
pecially on the much debated point of the 
conditions of admission to the Christian 
sacraments. Naturally also they represented 
a widening difference of theological con- 
viction. The " Improvements in Theology 
made by President Edwards " and enforced 
by his powerful reasoning and his lofty 
character had been by no means unani- 
mously accepted by the New England pas- 
tors. And now that remarkable dynasty of 
theologians who (as his son phrased it) had 
** followed his course of thought," had gone 
on to the third generation, adding new 
principles, and making new refinements 
and wider applications. Identifying them- 
selves with earnest movements for the ad- 
vancement of religion at home or afar, and 
much engaged in the training of students 
for the ministry, the leaders of the new the- 



Disruption 157 

ology soon became conscious of a growing 
influence that might easily seem to war- 
rant a tone of authority natural enough, but 
not conciliatory to the slower-moving and 
more cautious minds that held to the early 
forms of theological statement. There was 
nothing like schism either in or among the 
churches. But the two schools of opinion 
known as Old Calvinist and Hopkinsian 
were drawing apart from each other, and a 
dividing line might presently have been 
drawn between them, but for the emerging 
into plain view of another element in the 
life of the Congregational churches, which 
was destined, both by action and by reac- 
tion, to exert a profound and even revolu- 
tionary influence on Congregationalism. 

In the year 1787, the old Episcopalian 
church of King's Chapel in Boston declared it- 
self Unitarian, amended its prayer-book ac- 
cordingly and inducted into its ministry 
James Freeman, a man of avowed Unitarian 
principles. Thus "the first Episcopalian 



158 The Congregationalists 

church in New England became the first Uni- 
tarian church in America." It compelled at- 
tention to a fact which for many years had 
been no secret from any who chose to observe 
it, that throughout this part of New England 
there was a deep and frankly uttered dis- 
sent, not only from the extreme statements 
of the later Hopkinsians, but from the gen- 
eral system of doctrine which, as set forth in 
the Westminster standards, had not indeed 
been imposed as a test, but in repeated dec- 
larations of earlier date had been referred to 
as expressing the common belief of the 
churches. Among the dissidents were two 
eminent men who died in that same year 
1787 which witnessed the ordination of 
Freeman at King's Chapel : one was Ebe- 
nezer Gay, for nearly seventy years pastor 
at Hingham ; the other was Charles Chauncy, 
the antagonist of Edwards on the subject of 
the Revival, who for sixty years was pastor 
of the First Church in Boston. Much 
younger than either of these, though his 



Disruption 159 

brief and brilliant career closed more than 
twenty years earlier, was Jonathan May- 
hew, of the West Church in Boston, distin- 
guished not only for his captivating elo- 
quence, but for the large latitude of his the- 
ological opinions and his aggressive and 
defiant way of enunciating them. A fourth 
name to be added is that of Jeremy Belknap. 
In that same notable year, 1787, he came 
from Dover, New Hampshire, where he had 
been for twenty years pastor, to be the first 
Congregational minister of the Federal 
Street Church, which up to that date had 
been Presbyterian. His theological position 
was defined by his publishing a hymn-book 
from which all recognition of the Trinity or 
the supreme deity of Christ had been elimi- 
nated. 

The thing chiefly remarkable in the theo- 
logical situation illustrated in these conspic- 
uous instances is not the fact of a some- 
what prevalent departure from the standards 
of a previous generation. The like depar- 



l6o The Congregationalists 

ture is characteristic of the time both in the 
Old England and in the New. The wonder 
is that in an age of strenuous theological 
disputation it should have excited so little 
debate, and led to no rupture of fellowship. 
It certainly was not unnoticed. The men 
who have been named were of the highest 
eminence, and in eminent positions; and 
their opinions were distinctly understood. 
But, not without mutual anxieties and jeal- 
ousies, the various parties kept together in 
one fellowship of churches and ministers, 
in which relations of sincere respect and 
warm personal friendship stretched across 
the theological dividing lines. 

But schism was inevitable. It is not alto- 
gether strange that the first church to go 
asunder was the old Pilgrim church at Ply- 
mouth. When the church by a majority 
and the parish by an overwhelming vote had 
determined on the settlement of a minister 
of "liberal" sympathies, it was wholly in 
accordance with the Separatist traditions of 



Disruption l6l 

Plymouth that the dissatisfied minority, 
numbering ahnost one-half of the commu- 
nicant members, should secede "without 
tarrying for any." This they did, in Octo- 
ber, 1801, setting up at the entrance of the 
new church a dogmatic test intended to ex- 
clude Unitarians. The old church remained 
on the basis of the original church cov- 
enant. 

This was a preliminary and local skirmish. 
The tug of war began two years later, when 
the chair of theology in Harvard College fell 
vacant by the death of Professor Tappan. 
On the choice of his successor the parties 
joined issue. The corporation was equally 
divided, and the question hung long in the 
balance. At last the balance turned in favor 
of the ''Liberal" candidate, the greatly re- 
spected Henry Ware, pastor at Hingham. 
This election, and three others of like com- 
plexion which soon followed, announced 
unmistakably to the two ''evangelical" 
parties that the influence of the college was 



i62 The Congregationalists 

thenceforth committed to the opposite side. 
It was a painful and disheartening blow to 
those who cherished the doctrinal traditions 
of the New England churches. But there 
were severer blows to follow. 

The immediate consequence of seating 
the Unitarian candidate in the chair of the- 
ology at Harvard (it took place in 1805) was 
the founding of Andover Theological Semi- 
nary. With wonderful promptness the two 
" evangelical " parties, the Old Calvinist and 
the Hopkinsian, composed their serious dif- 
ferences and united their resources, and in 
September, 1808, the new Seminary, the 
first in Protestant America, was opened, 
with thirty-six students. For thirty years 
from that time, the annual average of enter- 
ing students was sixty-two. The Seminary 
was the mighty pioneer in that work of the 
systematic and thorough training for the 
ministry in which, both in their own semi- 
naries and by the service of their sons in the 
seminaries of other sects, the American Con- 



Disruption 163 

gregationalists have held an unquestioned 
preeminence. 

The two antagonist parties were now 
strongly intrenched at Cambridge and An- 
dover. Each had its monthly organ pub- 
lished in Boston, the Liberal Anthology and 
the Orthodox Panoplist. Each was eagerly 
desirous to place its best men in positions 
of influence. The accession to the Liberal 
pulpit of Boston of two such splendidly 
gifted youths as Channing at Federal Street 
and Buckminster at the Brattle Church was 
inadequately offset by the settlement of 
Joshua Huntington at " the Old South " and 
of the demonstratively and aggressively or- 
thodox John Codman at the Second Church 
in Dorchester. It was on the occasion of 
his settlement that Mr. Codman announced 
his purpose to draw a line of distinction in 
matters of professional courtesy among his 
neighbors of the opposing schools of opin- 
ion — an announcement which came near to 
costing him his place. But at this date 



164 The Congregationalists 

(1808) so far were the parties from a rupture 
of fellowship, that at the installation of 
Huntington the protagonists, Morse and 
Channing, took part together in the public 
services, and at the installation of Codman 
Channing preached the sermon. 

But it was impossible that the form of 
fellowship could long continue. The ten- 
sion was such that so small a matter as a 
pamphlet could start a rent that should run 
through the entire fabric. Dr. Jedediah 
Morse of Charlestown supplied the pam- 
phlet, under the title: ''American Unita- 
rianism; or A Brief History of the Progress 
and Present State of the Unitarian Churches 
in America." It consisted of extracts from 
letters from Mr. Freeman of King's Chapel 
that had been published in England in a 
"Life of the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey," a 
deceased Unitarian minister in London. 
The three points of offense in the pamphlet 
(for it was meant to be offensive) were 
these: that it gave the impression, (i), that 



Disruption 165 

there had been a covert conspiracy to draw 
away the New England churches from their 
faith; (2), that the leaders of New England 
Liberalism had been guilty of dishonest 
evasion and concealment of their principles; 
(3), that they were in sympathy with the 
highly unpopular theological tenets of the 
Rev. Joseph Priestley, leader of the English 
Socinians. The imputations were all of 
them unjust and outrageous. But they 
answered their purpose of infusing addi- 
tional acrimony into a controversy that 
needed no such intensifying. The war of 
journals, pamphlets and books waxed hot- 
ter and hotter. 

And now the schism went on apace. As 
in the days of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, 
the cry was, "To your tents, O Israel." 
At least, this was the cry of the Orthodox 
party, who were bent on forcing the fight. 
The time had arrived which Increase Mather 
foresaw and deprecated, when men would 
seek to "gather churches out of churches." 



i66 The Congregationalists 

In cases where the church, being Orthodox, 
found itself sustained by a majority, how- 
ever scanty, of the parish, no question need 
be raised. When the Orthodox church 
found itself opposed by the Liberal parish, 
it was advised to insist on its right of initi- 
ative in the choice of a pastor, or (fatal 
counsel, as it proved!) to separate from 
the parish and organize a new " ecclesias- 
tical society " for the care of its temporali- 
ties. The case of a Liberal church with an 
Orthodox parish does not seem to have oc- 
curred. In case of a parish asserting its 
Liberal sympathies with the consent or ac- 
quiescence of the church, persons of Ortho- 
dox convictions were strenuously urged to 
" come out of Babylon " and connect them- 
selves with some distinctly Orthodox church 
— a counsel by no means universally fol- 
lowed. 

For twenty years the schism went on 
rending and tearing, disturbing the peace 
of towns, churches and families. A nota- 



Disruption 167 

ble and in some respects exceptional in- 
stance is that of Dedham, which gave occa- 
sion for "the Dedham decision " found in 
volume xvi of the Massachusetts Reports. 
In 1 818, 'Mn that town, the majority of the 
church members being Evangelical, the so- 
ciety, /. e., the legal voters of the First Par- 
ish of Dedham, who were preponderatingly 
Unitarian, took the initiative and, in spite 
of the protests of two-thirds of the church, 
called the Rev. Alvan Lamson as their minis- 
ter, and invited a council of Unitarians to 
ordain him." The council, which included 
some of the foremost men of the Unitarian 
clergy and laity, consented to take this 
course, so utterly without justification in 
either principle or usage. The church now 
withdrew from the residuary minority that 
adhered to the parish. Hereupon arose the 
legal question, which part of the now di- 
vided church was the First Church in Ded- 
ham. The case being carried to the Su- 
preme Court of the State, it was decided 



i68 The Congregationalists 

that the parish church is the church that is 
connected with the parish — that the State 
recognizes no church as having any legal 
status except in connection with some regu- 
larly constituted society — that if the entire 
church should withdraw, it would thereby 
lose its existence, and a church which might 
afterwards be organized in the parish would 
succeed to the name and property of the 
seceded church. 

" The Dedham decision " had a sweeping 
application. According to a reckoning 
afterwards made from the Orthodox point 
of view, forty-six churches were ''driven 
from their houses of worship by town or 
parish votes or by measures equivalent to 
such votes" while thirty-five others had 
been "constrained in conscience to secede 
as individuals and form distinct churches." 
On the other hand not less than thirty-nine 
churches including some of the most vener- 
able and influential, while protesting against 
the separation that was forced for con- 



Disruption 169 

science' sake by the Orthodox part3% freely 
took their position on the Liberal side. In 
Boston one only of the old churches, the 
"Old South," remained to the Orthodox 
party, so complete had been the change. 
Boston ''awoke and found itself Arian." 
From this point forwards the Story of the 
Congregationalists is divided into two 
streams. 



CHAPTER XIV 

UNITARIANISM 

Never in all the course of church history 
has a new religious movement started with 
so magnificent a send-off as this of the 
Boston Unitarians. Granting the strength 
of its theological position, no element of 
strength beside seemed lacking to it. It 
numbered 125 churches, by far the greater 
part of which were in the region of Boston. 
Nine out of the ten churches of Boston ad- 
hered to it. Of the twenty-five first 
churches founded in Massachusetts, about 
twenty, beginning with the Pilgrim church 
of Plymouth, were Unitarian. The vener- 
able College at Cambridge was under its 
control. Church buildings and productive 
funds for religious uses amounting, it was 
estimated, to $600,000 were in its posses- 
170 



Unitarianism 171 

sion. The wealth, culture and social influ- 
ence of Boston were Unitarian. The great 
offices of the State were held by Unitarians. 
The Unitarian clergy-list was such a roster 
of splendid names as no clergy of like 
numbers in Christendom could show. 
Neither were its graces those alone of learn- 
ing and rhetoric, although in these it was 
greatly distinguished ; the more spiritual 
graces of charity towards man and piety 
towards God were, in many a beautiful 
instance, illustrated in saintly lives. There 
was much to justify the prophecy that was 
uttered, that Unitarianism would presently 
become the prevailing form of American 
Christianity. 

The theology represented by Channing 
and his friends was a lofty and reverent 
Arianism. Its methods were scrupulously 
biblical ; indeed as compared with their 
antagonists, it might not be unjust to say 
that they were the more biblist of the two, 
and the latter the more rationalist. The 



172 The Congregationalists 

strength — and the weakness — of the new 
movement lay not so much in its theology 
(using the word strictly) as in its anthro- 
pology. Its reaction from commonly ac- 
cepted forms of statement as to human 
depravity and impotence was violent. The 
command "honor all men" was obeyed 
from the heart. If its preachers were led 
thereby to adopt a weak tenet of "the 
rectitude of human nature," they suffered 
the consequence of a loss of grip on the 
average conscience, and the substitution of 
culture for conversion. 

The Unitarians were charged with having 
departed from the doctrine of the Fathers 
of New England. It was true. So, in a 
less degree and by more gradual deflections, 
had their accusers. But to claim that they 
had ceased to be Congregationalists was 
(and is) preposterous. The old churches 
of Boston and the neighborhood, in their 
old meeting-houses, under their regularly 
settled, recognized and approved pastors, 



Unitarianism 173 

without change of rule or organization, 
were going forward without other interrup- 
tion than that some of their members had 
voluntarily withdrawn. The departure 
from Congregational principles was not 
when the Unitarians, to their regret, were 
left by themselves in the old churches; but 
when the retiring members organized them- 
selves into distinctively and exclusively 
partisan churches, sometimes under ex- 
pressly sectarian names, as " Calvinistic" 
or ''Trinitarian," with tests intended to de- 
bar their late fellow-members from fellow- 
ship. 

In logic and in conscience the residuary 
parish church, holding the name and the 
privilege and the prestige of the old town- 
church, and its meeting-house, and its 
funds for the maintenance of the minister, 
ought to have assumed the duties and re- 
sponsibilities of the parish church, holding 
itself " debtor to every man " in the parish, 
except as some persons had discharged it 



174 The Congregationalists 

of the debt by committing themselves to 
other spiritual care. It was an immense 
opportunity that lay before these churches 
at the critical time when immigration was 
just beginning and the change from rural to 
village and city life was impending. It 
does not appear that they ever apprehended 
the duties involved in the privileges so lav- 
ishly bestowed on them. Perhaps no 
churches have shown less sense of responsi- 
bility for the population of a given precinct, 
than these old parish churches. That there 
were nobly generous men among them, and 
men possessed of an ** enthusiasm of hu- 
manity," is abundantly demonstrated, as by 
the "ministry at large" founded by Dr. 
Tuckerman, and other good works. But in 
general these churches, both in city and in 
country, were inactive and unenterprising. 

Without attempting to determine in what 
degree this fault is to be referred to defects 
of theology, it is easy to recognize in it the 
debilitating effect of the initial successes. 



Unitarianism 175 

The new sect (for such, by no consent of 
its own, it had come to be) had won two 
Pyrrhic victories: it had taken control of 
Harvard College; and it had come into pos- 
session, by a judicial decision that filled the 
"exiled" churches with an undying sense 
of injustice, of names and records and 
church-buildings and funds, that kept them 
very much "at ease in Zion." The move- 
ment was strangely sterile. It started in 
181 5 with 125 churches, of which 100 were 
in Massachusetts. Thirty-three years later 
it numbered 201 ; and fifteen years after that 
it numbered 205. In the last forty years, 
more earnest efforts at the propagation of the 
sect have not been without result. 

The real fruits of the Unitarian movement 
do not admit of tabulation, and they are 
very far from insignificant. The fact, in- 
deed, that the list of eminent names in 
American literature is so largely a catalogue 
of Unitarians cannot be confidently alleged 
as a fruit of the " ism." But the narrowest 



176 The Congregationalists 

sectarian prejudice against this order of the 
Congregational churches need not hesitate 
to recognize, not only the noble contribu- 
tions which it has made to great social re- 
forms, but also the salutary degree in which 
the principles and temper of Unitarian Chris- 
tianity have pervaded the literature and even 
the theology of the American church in 
general, including those parts of it which 
are least conscious of any such influence. 

Within the prescribed limits of this vol- 
ume, the history of this separation — the 
secession of the Orthodox from the Unita- 
rians — can be told only with the utmost 
brevity. Two incidents however demand 
mention. The first was the rise of the 
Transcendentalists. They represented the 
reaction, in the minds of thoughtful men, 
from that sensational philosophy of Locke 
and his Scotch successors which had so 
long been exclusively dominant in Amer- 
ica. Its first recognized entrance into church 
affairs was when, in 1832, the young pastor 



Unitarianism 177 

of the Second Church in Boston, Mr. Ralph 
Waldo Emerson, startled his congregation 
by proposing to abandon the observance of 
the Lord's Supper. He did not find it in- 
teresting, he said. When the church de- 
murred at this modest demand, he retired to 
his literary seclusion at Concord, not, how- 
ever, without treating his congregation, at 
parting, with an elaborate argument against 
its use of the sacrament. The old-style 
"Channing Unitarians," always reverent 
towards the Scriptures and the person of 
Christ, found much to offend them in the 
oracles with which the young philosopher 
emerged each autumn upon the lecture-plat- 
form. And when, in 1838, he delivered his 
address to the Graduating Class of the Har- 
vard Divinity School, they were more than 
offended, they were shocked, at what 
seemed to them nothing better than panthe- 
ism. It was "atheism disguising itself 
under a preposterous name," said one. 
Prof. Andrews Norton, eminent for his 



lyS The Congregationalists 

learning in the Scriptures and his defense of 
their authority, denounced the new teaching 
as " the latest form of infidelity," and Prof. 
Henry Ware, Jr., felt constrained in 
spirit to preach, in reply, in the college 
chapel, a sermon which he sent to Mr. 
Emerson with a friendly letter, and received 
in return an exasperatingly flippant answer. 
The war of pamphlets thus joined was 
still raging when a new combatant entered 
the field. Theodore Parker, in an ordination 
sermon preached in 1841, on "The Tran- 
sient and Permanent in Christianity," boldly 
challenged, in the startling and defiant way 
in which he delighted, that whole system of 
the defense of the gospel from history and 
miracle on which Channing and his asso- 
ciates had been accustomed to rely. "The 
foundations were destroyed, and what 
should the righteous do f " Something 
must needs be done; and yet process for 
heresy was hardly suited to the antecedents 
of Unitarianism. But practically, by general 



Unitarian ism 179 

consent, Parker found himself outside of the 
fellowship of the Unitarian ministry. 
Parker was not the man to shrink from the 
controversy thus invited. His position was 
reasserted with emphasis in his volume 
(1842) of "Discourse of Matters Pertaining 
to Religion;" and in his translation of De 
Wette's "Introduction to the Old Testa- 
ment" the most alarming results of German 
criticism were commended not only to the 
learned but to the popular mind. Instead of 
his country pulpit in Roxbury, he mounted 
the platform of the largest concert-hall in 
Boston, and became the most popular 
preacher in the city, while all over the land 
he was heard as a lyceum lecturer. It is an 
impressive illustration of the swift current 
of modern thought, that many of the opin- 
ions for which Parker was disfellowshipped 
as a heretic by the Unitarians in 1844, came, 
before the end of the century, to be dis- 
cussed as open questions among theologians 



i8o The Congregationalists 

of unquestioned standing in orthodox com- 
munions. 

When, after the close of the civil war, the 
Unitarians began to get together for an 
aggressive campaign, it became obvious 
that among the newer churches organized 
by new men, many of them recruited from 
other denominations and reacting violently 
from their former principles, the tide was 
setting vehemently towards an extreme 
radicalism. "The Western Issue" drawn 
between those who insisted on holding to 
the name of Christian, and those who 
wished to reject it in favor of some state- 
ment of "absolute religion," was so sharp 
that it would have split the denomination if 
this had been big enough to split. It was 
finally settled by the unanimous adoption, 
at the National Conference in 1894, of this 
declaration : 

"These churches accept the religion of 
Jesus, holding, in accordance with his 
teaching, that practical religion is summed 



Unitarianism 181 

up in love to God and love to man. 
The Conference recognizes the fact that its 
constituency is Congregational in tradition 
and polity. Therefore it declares that noth- 
ing in this constitution is to be construed as 
an authoritative test; and we cordially in- 
vite to our working fellowship any who, 
while differing from us in belief, are in gen- 
eral sympathy with our spirit and our prac- 
tical aims." 



CHAPTER XV 

AFTER THE DISRUPTION 

After the disruption of the two parties of 
the New England Congregationalists, in the 
first two decades of the nineteenth century, 
as soon as the smoke and dust of a most 
acrimonious controversy were a little blown 
away, it was for the Orthodox seceders at 
Boston to look about them and reckon up 
their losses. There was cause for both 
dismay and congratulation. Immediately 
about them the ruin was almost complete. 
The college was gone; and nearly all the 
old churches, with their venerable name and 
history, and their buildings and funds and 
legal privileges. Young Harriet Beecher 
(name afterwards illustrious) coming to 
Boston with her father in 1826, afterwards 
182 



After the Disruption 183 

wrote her impressions of the situation in 
these words: "All the literary men of 
Massachusetts were Unitarian. All the 
trustees and professors of Harvard College 
were Unitarians. All the elite of wealth 
and fashion crowded Unitarian churches. 
The judges on the bench were Unitarian, 
giving decisions by which the peculiar 
features of church organization, so care- 
fully ordained by the Pilgrim fathers, had 
been nullified. . . . The dominant ma- 
jority entered at once into possession of 
churches and church property, leaving the 
orthodox minority to go out into school- 
houses or town halls, and build their 
churches as best they could." 

On the other hand, the area of the 
Unitarian movement was singularly lim- 
ited. One of its own historians (Professor 
Allen) has thus defined it: '*A radius of 
thirty-five miles from Boston as a centre 
would sweep almost the whole field of its 
history and influence. Outside of this, 



184 The Congregationalists 

twelve or fifteen churches lay in a belt a 
little to the north, running as far back as to 
the Connecticut River; while the important 
towns of Portland, Portsmouth, Worcester, 
Providence, and New Bedford made its 
frontier stations. Baltimore and Charleston 
were distant outposts, established in 1817; 
New York and Springfield were added to 
the list in this very year." 

The rest of New England was hardly 
affected, except indirectly, by the contro- 
versy which had so convulsed the region of 
Boston. Everywhere else the churches 
stood true to the doctrinal system which, 
not without modifications in transmission, 
they had inherited from the fathers— more 
staunchly true, in fact, for the questions 
that had been debated. In Connecticut, 
the almost total failure of Unitarianism to 
make any lasting impression may be 
ascribed in part to the " consociation" sys- 
tem with its conservative influence; but 
quite as much to the fact that its orthodoxy 



After the Disruption 185 

was represented by the recognized leader- 
ship, not of extreme dogmatists of the 
somewhat domineering Hopkinsian dy- 
nasty, but by so commanding a personality 
and so genuinely liberal a teacher as Presi- 
dent Dwight of Yale College. In the loss 
of Harvard, the Orthodox party found 
consolation in the growing influence of 
Yale, and in the younger institutions of 
Dartmouth (1769), Williams (1793), Bowdoin 
(1794), and Middlebury (1800), while Am- 
herst was about to begin, in 1821, its dis- 
tinguished and eminently evangelical career. 
But especially reassuring was the effective 
work of Andover Theological Seminary 
(1808) sending out each year fifty or sixty 
recruits for the evangelical ministry so 
trained and equipped for their work as 
never young ministers had been before 
since the apostolic era. The noble success 
of this foundation inspired men to the 
imitation of it at Bangor (1816) and at New 
Haven (1822). Meanwhile Harvard was 



i86 The Congregationalists 

languishing, not only in its theological 
work, but in all its work, through a wide- 
spread mistrust as to its religious in- 
fluence. 

While the Unitarian Congregationalists 
succeeded, in Boston and its neighborhood, 
to the property and prestige and easy dig- 
nity of the establishment, their Orthodox 
brethren had settled into the attitude of a 
dissenting sect, with the good qualities in- 
cidental to such organizations, and *'the 
faults of its qualities." With conscientious 
zeal, as serving the Lord, they devoted them- 
selves to the work of "gathering churches 
out of churches," to eager polemic attacks 
upon the opposite party, and to the organi- 
zation of a propaganda for the principles 
which they sincerely identified with the in- 
terests of the kingdom of heaven. 

The acceptance of this attitude, necessi- 
tated, perhaps, by the situation, was favored 
by the dominant, not to say domineering 
influence, in that region, of a very remarka- 



After the Disruption 187 

ble and interesting and typical character, 
Nathanael Emmons, for fifty-four years pas- 
tor of Franklin, educator in theology of a 
hundred ministers, voluminous author of 
sermons and theological treatises. He was 
the ideal New England theologian, who 
could "look for an hour at the point of a 
needle without winking," and spend four- 
teen such hours daily in his study. He was 
reverenced by those who knew him well, 
for his ascetic sanctity; and impartial critics 
have admired not only the closeness of his 
reasoning, but the fervid earnestness of his 
sermons. Neither was he so rapt in celes- 
tial contemplations as to lose sight of earthly 
affairs. He was actively interested in mis- 
sionary enterprises and in public reforms 
and in the ethical aspects of civil politics. 
It is not strange that this vindicator of the 
autocratic sovereignty of God should find 
little to approve in the doctrinaire democracy 
of Thomas Jefferson, whom he picturesquely 
characterized, in a famous sermon, as "Jer- 



i88 The Congregationalists 

oboam the son of Nebat which made Israel 
to sin." 

Oddly enough, in passing from civil polity 
to ecclesiastical, he seems to have parted 
with his " iron logic " and his grammar, and 
also with his principles. For his ** Scrip- 
tural Platform of Ecclesiastical Government " 
(1826 — some later editions have been ** doc- 
tored") is a piece of low-grade "social- 
compact" Jacobinism, fallaciously argued 
and blunderingly expressed. A church, ac- 
cording to this ''platform," is a club the 
members of which are bound to such mu- 
tual duties as they may have agreed upon. 
It is ''essential" to the club, as "to every 
voluntary society, to admit whom they 
please into their number," and to rule out 
or blackball whom they please. This is the 
working basis on which the organization of 
the seceding churches of Eastern Massachu- 
setts proceeded; and the principle which it 
illustrated, though not adopted in articulate 
form, proceeding, nevertheless, from so in- 



After the Disruption 189 

fluential a centre as Boston, has had a wide 
and pernicious vogue in American church 
history. 

The first step taken in Boston towards re- 
trieving the painful losses of the Orthodox 
party, was taken with wisdom and energy. 
The most commanding position in the city 
was secured, at the corner of the Common, 
and a noble building erected, to be the home 
of the newly organized ''Park Street 
Church." This organization was effected 
in 1809, while the rupture between the par- 
ties was yet incomplete. But the manner 
of it left no room for doubt as to the pur- 
pose of the enterprise. The members de- 
clared their acceptance of the Westminster 
Shorter Catechism and of the Savoy Con- 
fession, and then added a creed of their 
own, drawn out in many articles, to be used 
as a test for the exclusion of applicants for 
membership who might be otherwise 
minded. It was to be frankly and expressly 
a sectarian church. This was not the first 



igo The Congregationalists 

instance of this departure from the Congre- 
gational usage which was still faithfully 
cherished by the old parish churches; but it 
was doubtless the most conspicuous and in- 
fluential instance. The Andover students 
would naturally take it as an object-lesson 
in church administration, and apply it as the 
normal method, at remote points. Mr. Joel 
Hawes, coming, in 1818 from Andover to 
the ancient church of Thomas Hooker at 
Hartford, persuaded the church to set aside 
the ancient covenant that had been in use 
from time immemorial, and substitute an 
elaborate code of doctrine in eleven articles, 
to which candidates for membership were 
required to give publicly their "cordial as- 
sent." Through the New England mission- 
aries the novel usage spread into the Presby- 
terian Church; and Scotchmen who had 
been accustomed to seeing the elders 
sworn into office by the Westminster 
standards were surprised to find the like 
dogmatic tests applied to the tender 



After the Disruption 191 

souls of neophytes at their first com- 
munion. 

The Park Street meeting-house came to 
be a sort of cathedral church to the Ortho- 
dox Congregationalists. From Andover 
came Prof. Edward Dorr Griffin, a thunder- 
bolt of theologic war, who in 1811, re- 
signed his professorship to become pastor 
of the church, and in a course of Sun- 
day evening lectures, afterwards pub- 
lished, set forth his convictions of truth in 
the most uncompromising, not to say ex- 
treme manner. It was sermons like that in- 
cluded in his published works, "On the 
Use of Real Fire in Hell," that won for the 
church the popular title of ** Brimstone 
Corner," and gave point to the practical 
comment of some irreverent hearer who 
sifted a train of flowers of sulphur from the 
church door to the door of the parsonage. 
In like spirit did Dr. Edward Payson, with 
what he doubtless deemed to be a holy 
boldness, propound his doctrine of human 



192 The Congregationalists 

nature, that **by nature man is, in stupidity 
and insensibility, a block; in sensuality and 
sottishness, a beast, and in pride, malice, 
cruelty and treachery, a devil." It is easy 
to believe (what indeed can be proved) that 
preachers whose teaching concerning hu- 
man nature was in such terms, were not in- 
capable of speaking of the divine nature in 
such a way as to justify the charge of trithe- 
ism so freely made against them, and so in- 
dignantly repelled. 

Thus on both sides of the dividing line, 
appeared some of the unhappy results of 
the great schism. The two wings of the 
noble brotherhood of the New England 
churches had gone asunder, and each wing 
by itself made a somewhat wobbling flight. 
If (as we have seen) the left wing bore 
away perilously in the direction of unbelief, 
the right wing was swaying towards forms 
of over-believing and misbelieving hardly 
less pernicious. Happily for those whose 
dangers lay in this direction, the polemic 



After the Disruption 193 

excesses of some near the storm-centre 
were in a way to be held in check by the 
good sense of their brethren more remote 
from the agitations and exasperations of 
controversy. 

Not less happily new and inspiring duties 
now emerged, lifting their hearts into a 
freer and serener atmosphere than that of 
the local contentions in which they were all 
the time tempted to waste their strength in 
*' beating their fellow-servants." 

Among the fairest fruits of the Second 
Awakening at the opening of the nineteenth 
century was the little company of Williams 
College students that was wont to meet be- 
side a haystack in a secluded meadow, to 
pray for the conversion of the world to 
Christ. In 1810, the third year of the Sem- 
inary at Andover, came these young gradu- 
ates of Williams, Samuel John Mills, Luther 
Rice, Gordon Hall, and James Richards, 
their hearts all aglow with a generous spirit 
of self-sacrifice for the kingdom of heaven. 



194 The Congregationalists 

Their noble enthusiasm infected their fel- 
low-students, and Adoniram Judson from 
Brown University, Samuel Newell from 
Harvard and Samuel Nott from Union were 
added to the number of *'The Brethren" 
committed to personal service as mission- 
aries to the heathen. They applied for ad- 
vice to the General Association of Massa- 
chusetts, then lately organized for ministe- 
rial fellowship to the exclusion of the Lib- 
erals, and by this body measures were taken 
that resulted in the organization, at the 
house of Noah Porter of Farmington, in 
1810, of the " American Board of Commis- 
sioners for Foreign Missions." In the face 
of serious discouragements the first five 
missionaries from America to a foreign 
country, Judson, Newell, Nott, Hall and 
Rice, were sent to India. The fact that two 
of the five, Judson and Rice, shortly after 
landing, announced their conscientious 
adoption of Baptist principles, however dis- 
heartening at first, fell out wonderfully to 



After the Disruption 195 

the furtherance of the gospel ; for it was not 
only the beginning of Judson's apostolic 
mission to Burmah, but it led to the com- 
mitting of the Baptist denomination to the 
enterprise of missions which it has prose- 
cuted with honorable success. 

The American Board has been the parent, 
directly or indirectly, of all American mis- 
sions in heathen lands. The nine commis- 
sioners from Massachusetts and Connecti- 
cut, of whom it originally consisted, soon 
added to their number representatives of the 
Presbyterian and Dutch churches, and the 
Board continued to be the channel of mis- 
sionary activity for both these denomina- 
tions until, after many years, they consti- 
tuted their separate organizations. The 
catalogue of its missions is a roll of honor 
splendidly adorned with the names of con- 
fessors and martyrs, and with the record 
not only of heroic endeavor but of success- 
ful achievement. 

The spirit of organization for beneficence 



196 The Congregationalists 

on a national or ecumenical scale possessed 
the Congregational churches at this period. 
A striking exemplification of the large- 
minded and unselfish way in which the 
business was done is found in the institu- 
tion at Boston, in 181 5, of the Education 
Society for furnishing recruits for the min- 
istry. Its benefactions were to be widely 
diffused, and representatives of other de- 
nominations, including Bishop Griswold of 
the Episcopal Church, were in the list of 
officers. It ceased to be servant of all the 
churches only when other churches preferred 
to serve themselves. As early as 1814, a re- 
ligious Tract Society was founded at An- 
dover, afterwards transferred to Boston, 
and becoming transfigured into the Ameri- 
can Tract Society, and at last merged with 
one of the same name in New York, at- 
tained to wide influence. There have been 
many to grieve that the Congregational 
churches should have spent their strength in 
furnishing and circulating literature "ac- 



After the Disruption 197 

ceptable to all evangelical Christians," while 
other sects were energetically pushing the 
literature favoring their several pretensions; 
and there have been not a few to congratu- 
late themselves on belonging to a fellowship 
capable of such honorable self-abnegation. 

When the first party of five missionaries 
sailed for India by way of the Cape of Good 
Hope, Mills, the foremost of the brother- 
hood, found himself bound in spirit to go 
in the opposite direction. With one com- 
panion, commissioned by the Connecticut 
Missionary Society, he set out on an adven- 
turous journey of missionary exploration 
through the unknown Southwest as far as 
New Orleans, preaching, distributing Bibles, 
and founding churches and Bible Societies. 
Insatiable of toil and hardship, he started 
two years later (1814) on a second tour 
through the same region, preaching at St. 
Louis the first Protestant sermon that had 
been heard west of the Mississippi, and 
with protracted labor organizing the First 



198 The Congregationalists 

Presbyterian Church in that Roman CathoUc 
town — the mother of many Presbyterian 
churches manned, under the Plan of Union, 
by Congregational pastors sustained by the 
Missionary Society of Connecticut. Out of 
the labors of Mills, and the reports which he 
brought home with him, came the merger 
of several local Bible societies in the Ameri- 
can Bible Society, 1816. 

In his long horseback journeys through 
the wilderness the prophetic soul of this 
young man had ample time to ponder an 
even bolder project of evangelic enterprise, 
which, however, was not original with him- 
self. Nearly fifty years before, Samuel 
Hopkins and his erudite neighbor at New- 
port, Ezra Stiles, had actually begun collect- 
ing money to be applied to the educating of 
Christian negroes in America, and sending 
them forth as missionaries to the Dark Con- 
tinent. This was the project that had a new 
birth in the heart of Mills. In 1816 he per- 
suaded the Presbyterian ''Synod of New 



After the Disruption 199 

York and New Jersey " to enter upon his 
plan for educating Christian men of color 
for the work of the gospel in their father- 
land. That same year he sailed in company 
with the Rev. Ebenezer Burgess (afterwards 
pastor of the "exiled" church of Dedham) 
to explore the coast of Africa for the site for 
a colony. On the return voyage he died, 
and his body was committed to the sea. 
When his surviving colleague brought home 
the sorrowful news, good men made lamen- 
tation; and some remembered how he had 
said to one of his fellows, as the class was 
scattering at the end of its studies, " You 
and I, brother, are little men, but before we 
die, our influence must be felt on the other 
side of the world." Only five years of 
active service, but the young man's word 
had come true! 

The crowning act of this decade of benef- 
icent organization was the instituting of the 
American Home Missionary Society in 1826. 
It was well named "American," for the 



200 The Congregationalists 

only limitation on the largeness and freedom 
of its mission work was the geographical 
limitation implied in that title. It was in- 
tended to coordinate and economize the 
work of many societies, presbyteries and 
synods, under the *' Plan of Union" which 
already for a quarter-century had been in 
operation, to the great aggrandizement and 
invigoration of the Presbyterian Church, and 
inevitably to the infusing into the articulate 
system of Presbyterianism something of the 
spirit that had been trained in the town- 
meetings and Congregational churches and 
the searching theological discussions of New 
England. By and by, when satisfaction in 
the growing numbers, wealth and influence 
of the Presbyterian Church shall come into 
collision, in some minds, with jealousy of 
the prevalence of this new spirit, conse- 
quences may ensue which could not be dis- 
tinctly forecast in advance. 



CHAPTER XVI 

PUBLIC REFORMS 

It took a wonderfully short time to re- 
cruit the Boston Orthodox Congregational- 
ists to a much higher effective force than 
that of the entire body of the churches be- 
fore the disruption. The work may be 
considered as mainly achieved, when, in 
1826, that fiery spirit, Lyman Beecher, was 
persuaded, at the high noontide of his 
great powers, to leave his rural parish on 
the hills of Litchfield, Connecticut, to be- 
come pastor of the newly organized Han- 
over Street Church. Here the intense ear- 
nestness of his preaching, with its strong 
appeal to the reason as well as to the feel- 
ings, was attended with constant and great 
spiritual results. For the six years that he 
remained, he was as distinctly the most 



202 The Congregationalists 

conspicuous leader of the Evangelical 
churches as Dr. Channing of the Liberal 
churches. Two eminently good men more 
contrasted in every quality of intellect and 
temperament it is difficult to conceive of, 
than these two representative Congregation- 
alists. It so happened that the time when 
they were serving so near each other, yet 
completely out of each other's sight and 
touch, was a time when the Congregational 
churches all with one accord, though in two 
divisions, were taking conspicuous part in 
some of those reformatory movements in 
which from the beginning they have had a 
noble record; it was also a time when the 
two parties, beside the conflict of each 
against the other, were grievously vexed 
each with sore controversy among its own 
members. How the Unitarian fellowship 
was distracted by the emerging of theTran- 
scendentalists and the neology of Parker we 
have already briefly told. Hardly more 
time need we spend in narrating the small 



Public Reforms 203 

contentions over questions of the metaphys- 
ics of theology which embroiled parties and 
schools among the Evangelicals. It is diffi- 
cult at the present day to appreciate the 
eagerness with which the tenuous distinc- 
tions that divided Andover from New 
Haven, and afterwards East Windsor from 
both, were gravely debated among the abler 
men, and painfully pettifogged by the 
lesser. Doubtless these divisions of party and 
faction, acrimonious as they were, were in 
some measure mitigated by the common 
zeal of all for great human interests. 

The interest of the Puritan churches of 
America in the conflict with drunkenness 
dates from their foundation. Among the 
earliest public ordinances of the legislatures 
were those for repressing the abuse of ar- 
dent spirits. The '* Reforming Synod" put 
special emphasis on the importance of en- 
forcing these laws. In fact the laws were 
of a most wise and salutary character, such 
as later devices have not much improved 



204 The Congregationalists 

upon. Under them the tippling-house, 
"saloon," or public barroom was illegal. 
The taverner's license empowered him to 
furnish to his lodgers their customary 
drinks; but not to allow drinking at the bar 
to his neighbors. President Dwight, in his 
'* Travels," notes the contrast between the 
orderly New England tavern, under the re- 
straint of this law, and the disorder visible 
at the taverns beyond the New York line, 
v^/here the license was regarded as a means 
of raising revenue. Nevertheless towards 
the end of the eighteenth century, as a result 
of combined causes not difficult to trace, 
there had come a wide-spread and pitiable 
lapse into drunken habits. Simultaneously, 
in various parts of the American church, 
there was a sudden awakening to an evil 
and peril that had grown stealthily and un- 
observed. It is no extravagant boast to say 
that among the earliest and most efficient 
leaders of the new reformation were the 
foremost men of the Congregational 



Public Reforms 205 

churches. Ebenezer Porter, Heman Hum- 
phrey, and the heroic layman, Jeremiah 
Evarts, were of the number. But the names 
of Lyman Beecher and William Ellery Chan- 
ningare honorably preeminent in these early 
days. Suddenly confronted with the actual 
state of society by an incident in his pastoral 
work in Litchfield, Beecher burst forth with 
an eruption of volcanic eloquence in "Six 
Sermons on Intemperance" which were re- 
peated in Boston and published in many 
editions. In impressive contrast with his 
impetuous neighbor, Channing, with calm 
intensity of speech, argued from his cher- 
ished tenet of the dignity of human nature, 
which he held with justifiable reaction from 
the extravagant statements of the tradition- 
ary theology, against the vice which debased 
one made " little lower than the angels " to 
the level of the lunatic or the idiot or the brute. 
And no doubt, thisgentler voice could reach 
many a heart and conscience to which 
louder tones found no access. 



2o6 The Congregationalists 

The first national temperance society was 
organized in 1826. The best and most en- 
during work of the reformation was 
achieved within ten years from that date; 
and it was accomplished ''without law, 
without any attempt at legislation, by the 
mere force of public opinion." It was the 
work of the Christian church, wherein if 
many daughters of Zion did virtuously, it 
would be willingly admitted that the Con- 
gregational clergy and churches, and those 
that had been colonized from them into the 
Presbyterian Church excelled them all. 

Later, the work took on a more ascetic 
and censorious character. From the year 
1840 it was assumed very much into the 
hands of professional "reformed drunk- 
ards" naturally inclined to extenuate their 
own faults by describing themselves as 
"victims" and putting the blame on "the 
traffic"; and into the hands of politicians 
who promised to secure the triumph of 
virtue by exterminating temptation. Even 



Public Reforms 207 

through these devious courses it was sus- 
tained by a great following from the 
churches, but no longer with that unanimity 
to which was due its early success. 

With reference to the subject of slavery, 
also, the record of the primeval Congrega- 
tionalists was wholly noble. The unbroken 
succession of protests and deeds against 
slavery has often been recorded, from the 
acts of the Great and General Court of 
Massachusetts (which, be it remembered, 
was also a church court) through the utter- 
ances of John Eliot and Samuel Sewall and 
Cotton Mather, down to the days of the 
war of independence, when the voices of 
Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles and Levi 
Hart and Aaron Cleveland, with many 
others, were lifted up in chorus in denunci- 
ation of the wrong. A little later (1791) 
the younger Jonathan Edwards preached 
before the Connecticut Abolition Society 
that sermon on " The Injustice and Impolicy 
of the Slave-trade" which was long cher- 



2o8 The Congregationalists 

ished and circulated as a classic of anti- 
slavery literature. It is not necessary to 
derogate from the high honor due to 
Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and 
Quakers, in thus asserting the worthy 
position held by the Congregationalists in 
the conflict with slavery. The tug of war 
began with the successful aggression of 
slavery in extending its domain beyond the 
Mississippi in 1820. Four trumpet-toned 
articles by Jeremiah Evarts in The Panoplist, 
rallied the opposition from its momentary 
discouragement, to an immediate, general, 
sustained and systematic effort for the abo- 
lition of slavery. The response was 
prompt and general. Those parts of it 
which most concern this story are the cru- 
sade organized by the students of Andover 
for anti-slavery agitation by the press and 
by speakers detailed to the neighbor towns; 
the annual fourth-of-July anti-slavery mass 
meetings maintained by the united Congre- 
gational and Baptist churches at Park Street 



Public Reforms 209 

Church, Boston; and the effort, originating 
at Andover, for the establishment of a col- 
lege for the liberal education of young men 
of color — an effort that narrowly failed of 
success. 

The Congregational churches had some 
advantages over others, with the drawbacks 
incidental to them, in their dealing with this 
question, destined to become so exciting 
and divisive, i. They had only the scant- 
iest affiliations at the South, which gave 
them the less power of influence over slave- 
holding communities, but released them 
from one temptation to make undue con- 
cessions to them. 2. Their State repre- 
sentative bodies, at this time, were exclu- 
sively clerical, and so exempt from the 
danger of being unduly swayed by politi- 
cian members. 3. Their large charitable 
and religious operations were carried on, 
not by delegated bodies framed into the 
constitution of the churches, but by volun- 
tary associations of individuals, undertaking 



210 The Congregationalists 

the duty of almoners in behalf of as many 
as might choose to trust them, and leaving 
the rest free to choose some other channel 
for their bounty. These were among the 
conditions that made it comparatively easy 
for the Congregationalists to pass through a 
most difficult crisis with conspicuous fidelity 
to truth and righteousness. 

During this period of " storm and stress " 
the churches were exposed to a double 
danger. Either they might be tempted, by 
no ignoble considerations, to compromise 
the interests of justice and humanity for 
the sake of religious or national peace; or 
they might be incited to a polemic fury of 
denunciation, censoriousness and hatred. 
To hold the religious public, in its various 
organizations to the middle course of strict 
righteousness was no light task. Among 
those whose influence most availed to ac- 
complish it, with Albert Barnes of the 
Presbyterians and Francis Wayland of the 
Baptists, like precedence will be generally 



Public Reforms 211 

conceded to the names of Channing and 
Leonard Bacon, Congregational pastors. 

Out of many incidents of that period of 
anti-slavery agitation of which the Missouri 
Compromise (1820) was the beginning, and 
the repeal of the Missouri Compromise by 
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854) was the be- 
ginning of the end, four may be named as 
of leading importance — the founding of 
Oberlin College and Theological Seminary 
(1834-5) ; the slavery debate in the American 
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mis- 
sions (1845); the founding of The Independ- 
ent (1848); and the Albany Convention 
(1852). 

For those who know only the Oberlin of 
to-day, well endowed, abounding in num- 
bers and resources, firmly intrenched in the 
confidence of the American church, and 
glorious with the prestige of great spiritual 
achievement, there is needed no small effort 
of the historic imagination to realize not 
only the feebleness and heroism of faith in 



212 The Congregationalists 

which it made its beginnings, but also the 
serious distrust with which it was regarded 
by wise and good men both at the West 
and at the East who were intent on the 
same objects by different methods. The 
founders of this great institution were of 
the number of the ''young men who see 
visions." A young Presbyterian pastor at 
Elyria, Ohio, John J. Shipherd, and an ex-mis- 
sionary to the Choctaw Indians, Philo P. 
Stewart, then living at Shipherd's house, con- 
certed between them the plan of a college 
open alike to men and women, furnishing a 
liberal education at the lowest possible cost; 
about the college as a centre, they would 
plant a community of Christian people like- 
minded with themselves. With few induce- 
ments beside the sheer joy of self-sacrifice, 
they gathered a little company of New Eng- 
land Pioneers in Ohio. They secured the 
title to a township of wild land in the 
"Western Reserve," entered upon it, axe in 
hand, cleared land and built their cabins and 



Public Reforms 213 

their first college building. Soon an incident 
occurred which gave an unexpected forward 
impulse to the undertaking. At Lane 
Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, where 
Lyman Beecher had come from Boston to 
be president, and Calvin E. Stowe was pro- 
fessor, discussion ran high among the stu- 
dents on the slavery question; which be- 
coming known to the trustees, they, with- 
out consulting the faculty, undertook to 
suppress it by edict. The result was that 
four-fifths of the students agreed to go to 
Oberlin on condition that the evangelist, 
Charles G. Finney, should be secured as 
their instructor. The condition was ful- 
filled, and the seminary which the projec- 
tors of this pilgrim colony had longingly 
hoped for was born in a day. With small 
respect to the warnings of prudent men as 
to the force of public prejudice, the 
college was freely open not only to 
both sexes but to all races. Without 
compromise or apology, the institution 



214 ^^^ Congregationalists 

was committed to a bold and unpopular 
radicalism. 

Mr. Finney himself was an impersonation 
of the characteristics of Oberlin. A man of 
absolute consecration, of ascetic self-denial, 
of tireless activity and endurance, he had 
ranged the country, east and west, on tours 
of revival preaching that had been attended 
by remarkable results, not only of momen- 
tary agitation (which was often great) but 
of the solid and lasting conversion, espe- 
cially of men of intelligence and force, to 
lives of intense evangelic earnestness like 
his own. But his beneficent work was as- 
sociated with "new measures" and new 
forms of doctrinal statement that excited 
serious misgiving or positive disapproval. 
His theology was in advance even of the 
Edwardean school, in its insistence on 
" ability as commensurate with obligation," 
and on a tenet of " Oberlin perfectionism " 
which led near the perilous verge, and in 
some cases beyond the verge, of antinomi- 



Public Reforms 215 

anism. For many years an Oberlin graduate 
was liable to be looked on doubtfully by 
cautious men, until he had personally given 
proof of soundness of doctrine and sobriety 
of judgment. Under a more rigid polity, 
such deviations would have led (as in the 
Presbyterian Church they did lead) to de- 
nominational schism. In this case, they led 
to earnest and instructive discussion, to the 
slow modification of opinions and methods 
on both sides, and to the grateful recogni- 
tion of Oberlin as a noble reinforcement in 
that service of Christ to which it had been 
consecrated by the prayers of its founders. 
The debate and consequent action on the 
subject of slavery at the annual meeting of 
the American Board of Commissioners for 
Foreign Missions, at Brooklyn, in 1845, 
were of critical importance. The question 
at issue was whether every holder of a 
slave ought by a fixed rule to be excom- 
municated, without regard to his conduct 
Nn that relation. The representatives of the 



2i6 The Congregationalists 

Anti-slavery Society, present in force, urged 
the affirmative. Tlie question was debated 
witii patience and thoroughness, and at the 
end a report was unanimously adopted 
reprobating in the strongest language the 
system of slavery, but refusing to sanction 
the rule condemning every slaveholder re- 
gardless of his conduct as such. The 
unanimity of this action was proof of that 
sober anti-slavery sentiment of the Ameri- 
can church in its several sects which carried 
the country, at last, for freedom. Of 
course many were disappointed at the 
failure of extreme action, and the cry was 
raised that "the church was the bulwark of 
slavery." But it was a happy illustration of 
the flexibility with which the Congregational 
polity accommodates itself to new exigen- 
cies, that the dissatisfied party found their 
redress so ready to their hand. Not being 
content with the declared policy of its 
almoner, they were free to find another. 
Within a year the ''American Missionary 



Public Reforms 217 

Association " was organized on distinctly 
and aggressively anti-slavery principles, 
and offered its services as an agency for 
both home and foreign missions. There 
was nothing schismatic in this. The new 
society entered at once on a limited but 
useful work; and the effect of its bid 
for the confidence of the churches was 
wholly salutary. The history of this and 
some like incidents may well satisfy the 
student that the best security against 
abuses in large charitable operations lies in 
the ready facility with which one agency 
may be exchanged for another, on the 
slightest occasion. A more recent illus- 
tration of the same principle was presented 
on occasion of a serious dissatisfaction with 
the doings of the executive of the "Ameri- 
can Board." The organization of a *' Berke- 
ley Temple Committee " promptly sup- 
plemented the defaults of the Board, and 
afforded that body a locus penitentice of 
which it was not unduly slow to avail itself. 



2i8 The Congregationalists 

Another incident of this period which 
requires little more than mention, but which 
is too important to the later history not to 
be mentioned, is the founding of The Inde- 
pendent newspaper in New York, in 1848, 
with Leonard Bacon, Joseph P. Thompson 
and Richard S. Storrs, Jr., as editors, 
Joshua Leavitt as office editor, and Henry 
Ward Beecher, then lately come from the 
West to be pastor of Plymouth Church, 
Brooklyn, as special contributor. The start- 
ing of this metropolitan enterprise was one 
indication out of many, of the disposition 
of the Congregationalists to escape from 
their provincial limitations and to take the 
continent for a field of work. Already they 
had showed a notable proclivity to religious 
journalism. Thomas Prince, Jr., in 1743-4, 
had published his weekly journal of revival 
news under the title of The Christian 
History. The Boston Recorder was insti- 
tuted in the height of the Unitarian contro- 
versy with Sidney E. Morse, son of Jedediah, 



Public Reforms 219 

as editor; and through sundry changes of 
title is continued to this day as The Congre- 
gationalist. The Religious Intelligencer y 
at New Haven, early in the century did im- 
portant service in guiding the swelling 
current of anti-slavery discussion. In 1823 
the brothers Morse founded, and for twenty- 
five years conducted, along cautiously con- 
servative lines, The New York Observer. 
In 1 83 1 The New York Evangelist v^2iS be- 
gun by Joshua Leavitt; one of its earliest 
successes was the publication of reports of 
Mr. Finney's sermons and lectures. In its 
later management, much of its editorial 
writing was done by Dr. Leonard Bacon 
and by his son George, pastor at Orange. 
The fact that so much of this important 
work of Congregationalists was done in no 
distinct connection with their denomination 
was highly characteristic. But the new jour- 
nal was at the beginning an expounder and 
advocate of Congregationalism. It was an 
invaluable adjuvant in the new westward 



220 The Congregationalists 

movement of the New England polity. 
And in the thickening slavery debate it was 
a mighty defender of those sober and 
strongly defensible positions against slavery 
which came to be the positions of the loyal 
states and of the nation. 

For more than two centuries, since the 
Cambridge Synod of 1846-8, there had been 
no attempt at a general meeting represent- 
ing the Congregationalists of America, when 
a movement of the General Association of 
Michigan resulted in an invitation to every 
Congregational church in the United States 
to be represented by pastor and delegate at 
a convention at Albany, October 5, 1852. 
There was serious reason why the demand 
for such a convention should proceed from 
the West. The " Plan of Union " had been 
repudiated in no courteous fashion by the 
Old School majority in the Presbyterian 
General Assembly at the time of its high- 
handed act of excision by which that sect 
had been broken into two nearly equal parts. 



Public Reforms 221 

The strong sympathy of the Congregational 
churches for the exscinded New School 
Church had made them reluctant to with- 
draw from that agreement, disadvantageous 
to themselves as it was known to be in its 
practical working. But it was now begin- 
ning to be apparent to both parties that the 
agreement could no longer be maintained. 
The eager competition of the Presbyterian 
agencies to secure a foothold in new settle- 
ments "in advance of all others," and the 
public disparagement of Congregationalism 
at the West as being something far less re- 
spectable than its New England original, 
called for an open demonstration of mutual 
fellowship between East and West, and 
some action on the "Plan" which had so 
manifestly outlived its usefulness. The 
convention was large and earnest. Four 
hundred and sixty-three pastors and dele- 
gates were present. Its most important ac- 
tion was, (i), by a unanimous vote to aban- 
don the " Plan of Union"; (2), to reprobate 



222 The Congregationalists 

the insinuations and charges against Con- 
gregationalists at the West; (3), to deliver 
with emphasis the unvarying protest of 
these churches against the "stupendous 
wrong" of slavery; (4), to undertake the 
raising of a fund of $50,000 to aid in build- 
ing churches at the West — a fund that was 
begun on the spot by the subscription of 
$10,000 from one of the delegates. The 
fund went on growing till it exceeded 
$60,000. 

The Albany Convention cleared the way, 
as it had not been cleared before, for the 
free advance of Congregational principles 
and organizations at the West. 



CHAPTER XVII 

CONGREGATIONALISM NATIONAL 

In the westward advance of Congrega- 
tionalism, it is easy, looking backward, to 
recognize, what was not always obvious 
at the time, that there were two Congrega- 
tionalisms moving forward together, some- 
times closely intertwined. First there was 
the Congregationalism of the old New 
England pattern, in which the form of pol- 
ity was cherished as the best means of 
bringing the Christian people of any com- 
munity into common fellowship and organ- 
ization. The principles of this Congrega- 
tionalism implied the duty of individuals 
and parties in any community to accept loy- 
ally and fraternally the judgment of the 
whole, even when it contravened their own; 
and by relieving the local congregation of 
223 



224 The Congregationalists 

any bondage of allegiance to a national sec- 
tarian propaganda, made it the easier for 
people of various persuasions and preju- 
dices to come together. Secondly, there 
was the come-outerism commended by Dr. 
Emmons as a "Scriptural Platform of Ec- 
clesiastical Government," the "scripture" 
of which was most distinctly written in the 
" Contrat Social" of Jean Jacques Rous- 
seau. It involved an unlimited " right of 
secession," and the right of the seceders to 
organize on an exclusive basis, keeping out 
such of their fellow-Christians as were un- 
congenial to them. This was the ideal un- 
der which the seceding Orthodox churches 
of Eastern Massachusetts had been organ- 
ized into a wonderfully effective and aggres- 
sive dissenting sect. From this influential 
centre it widely affected the Congregation- 
alism of the whole country. Not only did 
the use of imposed and prescribed doctrinal 
tests (so abhorrent to the Fathers) come 
into general use; but the new churches 



Congregationalism National 225 

v/ere distinctly labeled "Trinitarian" or 
* ' Calvinistic " ; and it came to be considered 
quite laudable, by stipulations in the cove- 
nant, to erect churches on an anti-slavery, 
or a total-abstinence, or a prohibitionist 
basis. The former method gave rise to 
Congregational churches, sometimes not 
ostensibly bearing that denomination, and 
uniting in one fellowship such various ele- 
ments as go to make up the Christian pop- 
ulation of a new settlement. The latter 
constituted churches of Congregaiionalists, 
in which each member was presumed to 
prefer a certain polity and type of dogma 
and usage of worship. It is remarkable 
that notions so mutually contradictory could 
work so kindly in harness together in home 
mission work. It is needless to ask which 
of the two was the more effective force in 
proselyting and propagandism. 

An interesting feature in the westward 
work of the Congregational churches has 
been the part taken in it by groups of col- 



226 The Congregationalists 

lege friends. In fact this is a frequently re- 
peated feature of all church history. To 
name no others, there was the group of Ig- 
natius Loyola and his friends at Paris; the 
" Holy Club " at Oxford in the days of the 
Wesleys; the Oriel College group later at 
the same university; and (not unworthy to 
be named with these eminent instances) 
"The Brethren " of Samuel J. Mills at Wil- 
liamstown and Andover; and the "Illinois 
Band" organized at Yale Theological Semi- 
nary in 1827, the type of later brotherhoods 
devoted to like service, and of more recent 
fraternities for "college settlement" and for 
university missions in the ends of the 
earth. 

If limits of space would permit, it would 
be a pleasure to transcribe so noble a roll of 
honor as the seven names of the Illinois 
Band. Eminent among them were Theron 
Baldwin, "Father of Western Colleges," 
and Julian M. Sturtevant, for fifty-six years 
in the service of Illinois College at Jackson- 



Congregationalism National 227 

ville. The method of the " Band " was fol- 
lowed by its successors. They seek the 
neediest or most hopeful field; they post 
themselves within supporting distance of 
each other; they establish churches and 
send for reinforcements; by combination 
they found a college. Western New York 
and Ohio had been occupied under the Plan 
of Union. Indiana had been occupied in 
force by the Methodist Church. Illinois was 
in need of laborers and they entered it with 
admirable zeal and success. The Iowa 
Band (Andover, 1843), and the Washington 
Band (Yale, 1890) have made a like record. 
The outbreak of the Civil War found the 
Congregationalists in a favored position. 
They had no Southern allies to be conciliated 
by compromise or antagonized by hostili- 
ties. They were of one accord on the ques- 
tions on which other denominations were 
divided and intensely agitated. Churches 
and colleges emptied their young men into 
the Northern army. The victorious end of 



228 The Congregationalists 

the war opened a great field of beneficent 
activity from which they had before been 
excluded by their known anti-slavery prin- 
ciples. It was fit that the denomination 
which from the beginning had been fore- 
most both in missions and in education, 
should be among the first and most effective 
in the new work of evangelization at once 
by church, school and college. With ad- 
mirable promptitude and energy, the Ameri- 
can Missionary Association recognized its 
calling, and became the almoner, not of 
Congregationalists only, but of many others 
eager to help in the work. The record of 
the success of this great work at the South, 
afterwards expanding to include *' the de- 
pressed races " generally, does not admit of 
being condensed into a tabular form; for it 
is in its nature diffusive. As it has not 
originated within sectarian limits, so its re- 
sults are not confined by them. Any sum- 
mary of its results must be taken with large 
allowance. 



Congregationalism National 229 

The new opportunities and responsibili- 
ties laid upon the Congregational churches 
by the changed conditions at the close of 
the war were widely felt to demand con- 
sideration in another National Council. It 
was thirteen years after the Albany Council 
of 1852, that the Boston Council of 1865 
assembled, June 14th, in the venerable Old 
South Meeting-house. It enrolled five hun- 
dred and two members, ministers and dele- 
gates of the churches. No one felt that the 
council failed of a great and high success, 
notwithstanding that two of the chief points 
in its program were only approximately 
reached. Considering how many genera- 
tions had passed since any authoritative dec- 
laration had been made of the common be- 
lief of the churches, and what considerable 
modifications had supervened upon the 
ancient "platforms" of polity, it was not 
unreasonable, in entering on widely ex- 
panded labors, to set forth distinct state- 
ments on both these points. It would have 



230 The Congregationalists 

been good for the churches represented to 
know their own mind clearly, and give clear 
and authorized assurances to the public 
whom they were offering to serve and to 
whom they appealed for cooperation. But 
after not a little debate, which left it uncer- 
tain whether the five hundred minds would 
agree in a common statement of belief, the 
council was fain to content itself with an 
improvised "Burial Hill Declaration" of 
adherence to the "faith and order held by 
our fathers " substantially as set forth two 
hundred years before. There is great virtue 
in that word "substantially." In like man- 
ner, a "platform" of church government, 
after the style of the Cambridge Platform, 
designed to represent existing usage, which 
had been prepared by two acknowledged 
authorities in church law, was laid aside in 
favor of a statement of principles in three 
brief paragraphs. Practically the most im- 
portant work of the council was its appeal 
to the churches to raise $250,000 for im- 



Congregationalism National 231 

mediate service in the evangelization and 
education of the freedmen of the South. 

At the close of the synod of 1637, held on 
occasion of the so-called Antinomian con- 
troversy, Governor Winthrop was so filled 
with delight at the spirit of wisdom and 
brotherly love that had prevailed, that (with 
a mind like that of Simon Peter in the holy 
mount) he proposed that there should be 
such a council every year. In like manner, 
the happy progress and outcome of the two 
National Councils at Albany and Boston led 
to the manifestation, not of a unanimous, 
but of a widely prevalent desire for a peri- 
odical national council. At various meet- 
ings held in the year 1870 for conference as 
to a celebration of the two hundred and 
fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the Pil- 
grims, this desire had formal expression; 
and after due consultation and preparation, 
the first of a series of triennial National 
Councils was held at Oberlin, November 
15, 1 87 1, with an attendance of 276 repre- 



232 The Congregationalists 

sentatives of Congregational churches in 
twenty-five States and Territories. A Con- 
stitution was adopted, fixing a ratio of rep- 
resentation, recognizing the autonomy and 
independence of the churches, disavowing 
all pretensions to legislative or judicial func- 
tions, and repudiating any claim to be the 
only churches of Christ. 

The National Council has thus far done 
little to justify the misgivings of those who 
doubted the wisdom of instituting it. One 
valuable service it has rendered with excel- 
lent tact and success. The declaration of 
the common belief of the churches by the 
vague announcement of a "substantial" 
agreement with ancient formulas had been 
quite satisfactory to very few, and highly 
unsatisfactory to many. The demand was 
presented to the National Council in 1880, 
for **a formula that shall not be mainly a 
reaffirmation of former confessions, but that 
shall state in precise terms in our living 
tongue the doctrines that we hold to-day." 



Congregationalism National 233 

The Council responded by appointing seven 
men who in turn should select a committee 
of twenty-five representing different regions 
and different tendencies, to draw up the de- 
sired statement. The sole instruction given 
by the Council to this committee of a com- 
mittee, was this admirably judicious one — 
that they should report, not to the Council 
but directly to the churches and to the 
world, through the press. The "Confes- 
sion of 1883," as their report is commonly 
called, bears no extrinsic sanction beyond 
the authority of the names subscribed to it; 
but as these include some of the ablest 
theologians and wisest men of their time, 
their work has met with general and solid 
approval. The document was signed by 
twenty-two out of the twenty-five names; 
and the entire freedom with which the three 
conscientiously withheld their signatures 
gave the more emphasis to the twenty-two 
names that were signed. 
The value of a later change accomplished 



234 The Congregationalists 

by the moral influence of the National Coun- 
cil remains to be tested by time — perhaps a 
long time. At the Council of 1892, after a 
decade of controversy sometimes acrimo- 
nious concerning the conduct of the executive 
of the "American Board," a committee ap- 
pointed three years before reported the ex- 
istence of a wide-spread desire that the 
Societies which were the agents of the 
churches in the administration of their com- 
mon charities, should become more directly 
representative of the churches in their con- 
stitution. It is a striking proof of the real 
pliability of a close corporation to public 
opinion expressed with emphasis, that with 
the least possible delay the "American 
Board " undertook to constitute a controlling 
part of its membership out of the nominees 
of the several State organizations represent- 
ative of the churches. It had already been 
demonstrated how prompt and effective was 
the recourse of the churches in case of dis- 
satisfaction with any of their almoners — 



Congregationalism National 235 

that it was simply to find or organize an- 
other to be employed instead. This course 
was taken in 1846, in the creation of 
the American Missionary Association, and 
again in 1888, in the activity of the Berkeley 
Temple Committee; in both cases with no 
harm done, and much incidental good. In 
this way no church had any difficulty in 
getting itself " represented " in the practical 
direction of the Societies. One hindrance 
was in the way of this recourse. The form 
of High-churchism by which Congregation- 
alists are affected is that of investing their 
apparatus of benevolent societies with a 
solemn and sacrosanct dignity, as if to inter- 
fere with them or divide them were a 
schism or a sacrilege — a habit which has 
been characterized as "sacrificing to their 
net and burning incense to their drag." It 
is the prevalence of this feeling that 
makes the only need of constituting the 
societies by a series of primary and 
secondary elections like those that go 



236 The Congregationalists 

to the making up of a political conven- 
tion. 

It is conceivable that, in their present 
tendency tov^ards solid organization on a 
continental scale as a sect in competition 
with other sects, Congregationalists may 
gain some of the advantages of confedera- 
tion, while losing none of the distinguished 
advantages of the former independence; it 
is conceivable, but, judging from the past 
of church history, not probable. Looking 
far ahead, it is easy to foresee the emergence 
of questions upon credentials, or upon the 
"recognizing" of a theological seminary, 
that shall invest the National Council, in 
spite of itself, with judicial functions. In 
like manner the investing of State * ' Associa- 
tions" with the right of nominating direc- 
tors to national societies may, in easily im- 
aginable contingencies, devolve upon the 
societies the arbitration of disputes, and 
draw them into controversies in comparison 
with which the stormiest experiences of the 



Congregationalism National 237 

past would seem like a calm. It is the loose 
texture of their organization which in the 
past has saved the Congregationalists, in 
every case but one, from any distinct and 
lasting schism. It is not possible to make 
the tissue more fibrous and hard, without 
making it more fissile. 

The present tendency to federation is a 
clear triumph of the sectarian Congregation- 
alism of Dr. Emmons and modern Boston, 
over that comprehensive Congregationalism 
of the New England Fathers, which was 
commended by Dr. Leonard Bacon and 
President Sturtevant. It remains to be seen 
whether the centripetal force will be happily 
balanced and corrected by the centrifugal. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

RECENT QUESTIONS 

While these events and movements, dur- 
ing the latter half of the nineteenth century, 
had been carrying the principles and insti- 
tutions of Congregationalism to the ends of 
the continent and of the earth, a change of 
practical theology had been going forward 
'*not with observation " which is hardly less 
than revolutionary. The change began with 
the publication by Horace Bushnell of Hart- 
ford, 1847, of a thin volume of "Views of 
Christian Nurture and of Subjects Adjacent 
thereto." The history of the book is inter- 
esting. Two discourses on this thesis, 
** That the Child is to grow up a Christian," 
had excited not a little interest in the circle 
of the author's ministerial neighbors. The 
publication of them was called for, and the 
238 



Recent Questions 239 

discourses were unanimously approved and 
accepted for publication by the Massachu- 
setts Sabbath-School Society. Months 
passed, during which influences were busily 
set at work, ultimately with success, to in- 
duce the Committee of Publication to reverse 
its action. The manuscript being returned 
to its author, was published by him with an 
"Argument for the Discourses" and addi- 
tional papers, on "The Spiritual Economy 
of Revivals of Religion"; "Growth, not 
Conquest, the True Method of Christian 
Progress"; "The Organic Unity of the 
Family " ; " The Scene of the Pentecost, and 
a Christian Parish." It could have been no 
matter of regret to the author that the efforts 
for the suppression of his book should have 
resulted (as usual in such cases) in quick- 
ening public interest in it. It was gravely 
impugned for heresy; but the author was 
fortunate in having drawn this fire in ad- 
vance; his "argument for the discourses " 
went to prove not only that the doctrine of 



240 The Congregational ists 

the discourses was the common orthodoxy 
of the church from the earliest ages, but that 
the revivalism against which it was aimed 
was itself a modern innovation, dating 
chiefly from the Great Awakening of a hun- 
dred years before. 

The inevitable discussion that followed 
upon this challenge was attended with no 
immediate visible consequences of impor- 
tance; but not often in the history of theo- 
logical literature has any book been so dis- 
tinctly proved to have "its seed in itself 
after its kind." The author's high faith and 
deep sincerity of conviction, his boldness of 
paradoxical statement, and the rare charm 
of his literary style, both in this and in 
his copious later works, captivated the at- 
tention of thoughtful readers throughout 
Christendom. He survived the often re- 
newed scourge of tongues, to find himself 
in his lifetime, canonized in the affections 
of multitudes in every part of the church 
catholic as saint and doctor of the church. 



Recent Questions 241 

Directly, and quite as much indirectly, tiie 
little volume on Christian Nurture, in its 
original form and in its later redactions, has 
had a profound effect, in every sect of the 
American church, in modifying the exag- 
gerated revivalism which has been its dis- 
tinguishing characteristic for a century and 
a half. An incidental result of the book is 
found in the world-wide institution of the 
Societies of Christian Endeavor, the founder 
of which, as pastor of a church in Portland, 
Maine, refers to this book as the germ of 
his enormously productive labors for the 
young. 

The bearing of this doctrine of Christian 
Nurture on the essence of the Congregational 
polity belongs partly to prophecy as well as 
to history. The story of the Congregational 
churches has been told inadequately indeed, 
if it has not disclosed the recurring embar- 
rassments in which they have been involved, 
from the very beginning, by their demand, 
as a condition of full communion, for the 



242 The Congregationalists 

evidence of a conscious experience of con- 
version. It is wonderful whiat progress has 
been made, in fifty years, in the reconsider- 
ation of a principle once deemed axiomatic. 
The reconsideration cannot proceed further 
without being attended by reconstruction 
fitting to new conditions. An illustration 
added to many heretofore adduced, of the 
non-persistence of schisms among Congre- 
gationalists is found in the fact that the 
Seminary which was Dr. Bushnell's most 
acrimonious antagonist in this and later con- 
troversies, being now transplanted to Hart- 
ford, the scene of his illustrious labors, is 
distinguished among others by its reverence 
for his memory. 

Of the difficulties encountered by Con- 
gregationalists in making the theological 
change of base necessitated by advances in 
Biblical study, there is the less occasion to 
speak, as these difficulties are common to 
all sects and all theologies. Yet it is well to 
record that theirs was the leadership into 



Recent Questions 243 

these difficulties, through the pioneer work 
of Moses Stuart and Edward Robinson, and 
later of George R. Noyes, Andrews Norton 
and Theodore Parker; and they have paid 
their full quota of contributions to the re- 
lieving of the same difficulties. 

More special to Congregationalism are 
certain questions just now emerging which 
concern the application of that polity to 
church work in great cities. One of them 
is this: whether, in meeting the exigencies 
of this work, the several congregations of 
the city may not so combine as to act, in 
some respects, as one church. History is 
not without some hints bearing on this 
question. It leads back the mind to that 
very early date (1650) when, the church in 
Boston having overflowed the capacity of 
its meeting-house, provision had to be made 
for the growing population. This was 
really a crisis in the development of the 
New England church polity. Should an ad- 
ditional meeting-house be built for the 



244 ^^^ Congregationalists 

church of Boston, now grown too large 
ordinarily to meet in a single building; or 
should there be two churches, a First and a 
Second ? On this point the intimations of 
Scripture seem sufficiently clear; the stu- 
dents of the New Testament who had seen 
so clearly and insisted so sturdily that the 
Scriptures recognize no such thing as the 
church of a province, were certainly not 
incapable of perceiving the exactly parallel 
fact that the Scriptures are equally ignorant 
of the churches of a town; that *'the church 
of Achaia " or "the church of Galatia " is 
not more foreign to apostolic usage than the 
First Church and Second Church in Ephesus, 
or the North Church and the South Church 
in Rome, or St. Cephas' Church and St. 
Apollos' Church and Christ Church in Cor- 
inth. Apparently, however, the arbitrary 
dogma that a church "ought not to be of 
greater number than may ordinarily meet 
together conveniently in one place " was 
already a veil upon their hearts. The an- 



Recent Questions 245 

swer to pending questions about church 
work in cities must be sought by going 
back of the Cambridge Platform; and, in 
modern America, rather in the direction of 
church federation, than in the direction of 
sectarian combination. 

Another question which sometimes arises 
touching the conduct of great city churches, 
involving the doubt whether the Congrega- 
tional polity is applicable to that function, is 
answered by history with great distinctness. 
By painfully practical demonstration it has 
sometimes been made to appear as if the 
constitution that works admirably in a 
church of a hundred members was im- 
practicable in a church of ten or fifteen 
times as many. The difficulty is identical 
with that which is encountered in the ad- 
ministration of the town-meeting govern- 
ment when the few hundred voters of the 
town have been multiplied to the many 
thousand voters of a city. The direct de- 
mocracy of the town-m.eeting: has to be 



246 The Congregationalists 

superseded, in that case, by the repre- 
sentative democracy of city government. 
The conduct of a multitudinous city church 
requires a like modification; otherwise it 
settles, in peaceful times, into an oligarchy ; 
in times of excitement and irritation, it is in 
danger of becoming a mob. At all times, 
such a body is absurdly unqualified for the 
judicial duties which are among the most 
serious duties which devolve upon a church. 
A glance into the past, even the recent past, 
discloses an important relief for this diffi- 
culty; for it is within the memory of living 
men that New England churches have begun 
to be governed by universal suffrage. By ap- 
proved usage the government of the church 
was in the hands of the men of full age. 
Looking still further back, we find the gov- 
ernment of the church vested in a represent- 
ative body of three or more elders, with a 
reference, on capital questions, to the vote 
of the brotherhood. It admits of doubt 
whether the original church of Boston, or 



Recent Questions 247 

Salem, or Hartford, with its restricted suf- 
frage, its government by a board of elders, 
and its lack of a prescribed code of dogma 
as a bar to membership, would be recog- 
nized to-day as a Congregational church. 
Future experience may show whether or 
not our modern Congregationalism is too 
rigidly hardened into its recent sectarian 
mould to admit henceforth of that elastic 
adaptation to changing needs by which it 
has formerly been distinguished. 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE UNITARIANS 

The story of that wide-spread alliance of 
churches which likes to claim for its ex- 
clusive use the title of The Congregational- 
ists has been told at such length as to leave 
no adequate space for other histories that 
are entitled to be included under the same 
denomination. 

The story of the Unitarian churches, from 
the beginning, is included in the general 
history of the churches of New England. 
The story of the disruption by which, early 
in the nineteenth century, the Congre- 
gational churches ''became two bands," 
has been briefly told, with some incidents 
of later history. (See pp. 155-184.) But 
in general the Unitarian wing of the Con- 
gregational churches of America is entitled 
248 



The Unitarians 249 

to the beatitude pronounced on the land 
whose annals are brief. Its history is 
adorned with some of the noblest names in 
American literature, theology, patriotism 
and beneficence. Its influence on the mind 
of America and of the world has been 
quite out of proportion to its numbers; but 
then, on the other hand, its numbers and 
visible, corporate achievements are equally 
disproportioned to the magnificent equip- 
ment of men and material resources with 
which its career began. It began (taking 
1820 as the date of the completed dis- 
ruption) with more than one hundred 
churches, including some of the strongest 
and most historically venerable in America, 
and with a clergy such as (for its numbers) 
all Christendom beside could hardly show. 
At the end of forty years of immense ex- 
pansion of the country, the number of 
churches had not been doubled; and the 
denomination had grown relatively weaker 
in its own metropolitan centre, Boston, 



250 The Congregationalists 

while its outposts were far from vigorous. 
It had no foreign missions; and had taken 
an inappreciably small part in the distinctive 
work of the Congregationalists — that of 
supplying the country with institutions of 
the higher learning. This statement makes 
no account of the beneficences of indi- 
viduals; but making the largest allowance 
on this score, the comparative sterility of 
Unitarianism as a sect is a fact that needs 
explaining. 

Some of the reasons for it are altogether 
honorable. From the outset, the Unitarian 
churches had been most unwilling to be a 
sect; and became such, not by their seced- 
ing from others, but because the others 
insisted on seceding from them. They 
were reluctant and slow in putting them- 
selves in battle array for aggressive action. 
Appeals to sectarian pride and aggrandize- 
ment tended rather to repel than to attract; 
and rather than let anything be done 
through strife or vainglory, they some- 



The Unitarians 251 

times preferred not to let anything be done 
at all. But after all it is not easy to acquit 
them of the charge of letting their liberalism 
lapse into indifferentism. There was truth 
as well as salutary pungency in the com- 
plaint of James Freeman Clarke: "The 
Unitarian churches of Boston see no reason 
for diffusing their faith. They treat it as a 
luxury to be kept for themselves. ... I 
have heard it said that they do not wish to 
make Unitarianism too common." 

After the close of the civil war, in which 
individual representatives of both clergy 
and churches had done splendidly dis- 
tinguished service, in the field and in the 
hospital and preeminently in the Sanitary 
Commission, the impulse to undertake some 
important work for the reconstructed coun- 
try which was felt by every religious 
organization, did not fail to excite to good 
works the Unitarian body. The American 
Unitarian Association, which since its be- 
ginning in 1825 had languished on a starv- 



252 The Congregationalists 

ing income, took a vigorous start forward. 
Its income rose at a bound from $8,000 to 
$100,000. Among the first-fruits of this 
new enterprise was the extremely effective 
measure of establishing stations at im- 
portant university towns, beginning with 
Ann Arbor, Michigan. But the consider- 
able accretions to Unitarianism as a de- 
nomination, particularly at the West, which 
ensued upon this aggressive policy were 
attended with serious inconveniences. 
Among the new adherents were some 
who in the violence of their reaction from 
more rigorous forms of Christianity were 
openly reacting from Christianity itself. 
The system of Unitarianism as a school of 
Christian teaching was thus brought under 
a wider and more serious reprobation, 
which the sincere faith and wholesome 
instruction and saintly lives of its great 
theologians and philanthropists have availed 
little to avert. 
That the mission work of the Unitarians 



The Unitarians 253 

should have a more distinctly sectarian 
character than that of other Christian bodies 
is a paradoxical fact which is explained by 
the necessity of the case. It is the attitude 
of their fellow-Christians towards them 
that forces them, in turn, into an attitude 
most uncongenial to their antecedents and 
habits. The ill-effects to both parties of 
the complete sundering of fellowship be- 
tween the two parties of Congregational- 
ists, finds new illustration in a divergence 
now in progress. A tendency zealously 
favored among the Orthodox is to abolish 
the parish or ** ecclesiastical society" which 
has been ordinarily the holder of the tem- 
poralities of the church, and to have the 
church itself made a legal corporation for 
the holding of its property, real and per- 
sonal. The Unitarians, moving in the other 
direction, tend to the abolishing of the 
church as a distinct spiritual covenanted 
body, leaving nothing but a society behind. 
The history of this last hundred years has 



254 The Congregationalists 

dwelt on divergences more and more dis- 
tinctly emphasized between these parties. 
There are also converging lines, growing 
more and more distinct with the lapse of 
recent years. It may be that a new chapter 
is about to be added to the history. 



CHAPTER XX 

A WIDER REVIEW 

We have now traced, in our rapid narra- 
tive, the growth on American soil of a 
system of church poHty which has pro- 
foundly influenced the course of church 
history and even of political history in the 
western hemisphere. Many factors have 
entered into the result. There was the 
providential opportunity afforded to the 
Founders of freely building, not on other 
men's foundations. There was sincere and 
diligent study of the Scriptures in search of 
a divinely approved polity. There was re- 
action from abuses that had been observed 
and painfully experienced in the old coun- 
try. There was pressure of new exigencies 
in the new country. Incidentally there was 
the influence, never a controlling one, of 
255 



256 The Congregationalists 

many past years of Separatist theorizing 
and experimentation, of which the fairest 
and sweetest fruit was the feeble church 
and colony of Plymouth. 

This polity native to the soil took vigor- 
ous and enduring root, while all the colonial 
church establishments beside, Catholic, An- 
glican, Quaker, and Reformed, died or 
languished. Early in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, the course of the history of the Con- 
gregational churches of America became 
divided into two streams of very unequal 
volume — a division which has persisted to 
the present day. 

Of the several church-fellowships dis- 
tinctively Congregational in organization 
but not in the same line of historical con- 
nection with the primeval churches, one is 
so preeminent in numbers and honorably 
distinguished in its long history as to have 
demanded a separate volume on "The Bap- 
tists" in the series of "The Story of the 
Churches." 



A Wider Review 257 

Among the rest, one of the most inter- 
esting is that which entitles itself "The 
Christian Connection." It was a growth of 
the great revival at the beginning of the 
nineteenth century, at which time a serious 
protest against the insistent dogmatism of 
many Congregational and Presbyterian 
churches, setting up codes of doctrine as a 
bar to membership, alienated some earnest 
people who, finding themselves thus ex- 
cluded from the communion which they 
would have sought, entered into fellowship 
with each other on the basis of a common 
allegiance to Christ, and a common subjec- 
tion to the will of God as set forth in the 
Scriptures. By a notable coincidence this 
process was going on simultaneously at 
three remotely distant centres of revival, in 
Virginia, in Vermont, and in Kentucky and 
Ohio. The multiplying and increasing con- 
gregations were not long in finding each 
other out, even over such vast intervening 
distances, and in entering into relations of 



258 The Congregationalists 

correspondence. Agreeing in a common 
faith and a common order, they are still 
more emphatically at one in their repudi- 
ation of imposed creeds as barriers to fel- 
lowship among Christian disciples, and 
their protest against sectarian names and 
divisions. We have already seen how, 
about this same time, there arose, especially 
in Eastern Massachusetts, an inordinate zeal 
for imposing dogmatic tests, and for propa- 
gating select sectarian churches according 
to the pattern designed in the ** Scriptural 
Platform " of Dr. Emmons. This tendency 
among the Congregationalists of that period 
did much to justify and even necessitate the 
separate organization of **The Christian 
Connection." By a process not without 
precedent in church history, the protest 
against sectarianism became itself the basis 
of a sectarian organization; and the honor- 
able aversion to bear any divisive name has 
inevitably resulted in the perversion of the 
name of Christ (as at Corinth in the 



A Wider Review 259 

apostolic age) into a sectarian appella- 
tion. 

The churches of " The Christian Connec- 
tion," nearly fifteen hundred in number, 
comprising upwards of one hundred thou- 
sand communicants, are simply Congrega- 
tional churches. There was once a reason 
for their separate organization. At the 
present day, no such reason (aside from the 
fact that the organization already exists) 
could be alleged which would not be equally 
a reason why the communion of the Congre- 
gational churches should be itself divided 
by the withdrawal or exclusion of some of 
its worthiest churches. The continuance of 
the divided organization after the reasons 
for it have ceased is one illustration out of 
many of how much easier it is to create a 
division than to heal it. 

The Universalist denomination, which, 
through changes of sentiment on both sides 
of the dividing line of controversy, is in less 
sharp antagonism than formerly with the 



26o The Congregationalists 

" orthodox " sects, is nevertheless removed 
from the category of strictly Congregational 
churches by some features of organization 
which affiliate it rather to the family of the 
classical or synodical churches. A like ob- 
servation would apply to some of the or- 
ganizations of the vastly expanding and 
increasing body of the Lutheran churches, 
among which the tendency towards the 
autonomy of the local congregation is 
clearly noticeable. 

In fact the prevailing power of the Con- 
gregational principle, in America, is no- 
where more impressively manifested than in 
its practical dominance in those orders of the 
American church in which theoretically it is 
least recognized. No American sect has 
been organized with a loftier contempt of 
Congregational principles than the Methodist 
Episcopal Church as it took form under the 
controlling influence of John Wesley. 
" We are not republicans, and do not intend 
to be," was his characteristic dictum. But 



A Wider Review 261 

in spite of his intentions, that is the direc- 
tion in which his great institute is tending. 
Even the form of the original oligarchy has 
been modified by our climatic conditions; 
and where the form remains, it is well un- 
derstood, both within and without, that the 
absolute authority over the individual con- 
gregation is to be exercised with scrupulous 
regard to the previously ascertained wishes 
of the congregation. 

It would naturally be expected that the 
last of the hierarchical church-governments 
to yield to the Congregational principle of 
local home rule should be the episcopacy of 
the Roman Church. And indeed through 
many trying and critical years the conflict 
between hierarchical authority, and con- 
gregational rights under the name of " trus- 
teeism," was fought out, and carried in 
favor of the hierarchy at last, only under 
pressure of the extreme sanctions of spirit- 
ual power. The result of the conflict was 
nominally a complete victory of the episco- 



262 The Congregationalists 

pate over the congregations; but virtually it 
left the two parties in such a mood of re- 
spect for each other's powers as to result in 
a tacit understanding that the absolute 
power of the clergy is to be exercised, 
except in extreme cases, according to the 
ascertained wishes of the congregation. It 
would be too much to say that the polity of 
the Roman Catholic Church in the United 
States is Congregational; it is not too much 
to say that the administration of it has been 
profoundly affected by the spirit of those 
conceptions of church order which are the 
native growth of our soil. Nowhere is this 
influence more justly appreciated than in 
those conservative circles of Old World 
Catholicism in which the words '' L^ameri- 
canisme/' " der Ameri/ianismus," are whis- 
pered as words of serious portent. 

The Story of the Congregationalists as 
here told has been narrowly limited to the 
genesis, growth and expansion of it in 
America. In England, the practical institu- 



A Wider Review 263 

tion of Congregational churches had to wait 
for a half century from the American be- 
ginnings. Under the Commonwealth, the 
problem of the reconstruction of the ecclesi- 
astical institutions of the nation was resolved 
in the Westminster Assembly in a Presby- 
terian sense. In that historic council the 
principles that had been wrought out into 
practice in New England were represented 
by a minority inconsiderable in number, but 
in every other measurement worthy of all 
consideration. What might have been the 
result if the great leaders of the New Eng- 
land churches had not declined the urgent 
invitation to return and take part in the de- 
liberations, is an interesting but not a prac- 
tical question. The many New Englanders 
who did return and rose to high places un- 
der Parliament and Protector must doubtless, 
by their testimony, have made a deep im- 
pression on public opinion. But those un- 
certain and stormy days were not favorable 
to church-building, and whatever begin- 



264 The Congregationalists 

nings were made were soon swept away 
by the fetid reflux of the Restoration. 

The history of the English Congregation- 
ahsts from the Act of Toleration in 1689 is 
not less noble than that which we have re- 
counted in America. It is the story of pa- 
tient endurance for conscience' sake under 
long persistent public odium and insult; of 
honorable achievement in education and 
learning and high public service, in spite of 
the protracted exclusion from the universi- 
ties; and of self-denying mission work at 
home and in the ends of the earth, such as 
might well put to shame the Establishment 
with its immense resources, and provoke it, 
at last, to a worthy emulation. 

The task imposed upon the Congrega- 
tionalists of England was a far different 
one from that which had burdened their 
brethren in the American wilderness sixty 
and seventy years before, and in some re- 
spects a more painful one. The duty was 
not laid upon them to organize a system of 



A Wider Review 265 

churches and parishes for a growing State; 
but only, in that evil and adulterous genera- 
tion, to make such protest for righteousness 
and for Hberty and purity in worship and 
discipline as their scanty numbers and poor 
resources would permit. There was no 
necessity for maintaining among their scat- 
tered congregations such mutual correspond- 
ence as was required among the parish 
churches of New England. Consequently 
it became characteristic of them to insist 
with emphasis upon the independence of 
the churches, and to look with distrust upon 
even the most guarded alliance of churches 
for common ends. Not until 1833 was a 
common organization effected, in "The 
Congregational Union of England and 
Wales." Of late the tendency has been 
strong in the direction of closer organization, 
being promoted by frequent correspondence 
with the American churches, and still more 
by a growing sense of the common inter- 
ests and duties of the free churches of the 



266 The Congregationalists 

United Kingdom, in all their different orders. 
The wide and powerful expansion of Con- 
gregational institutions throughout the 
British Islands and the British Empire is a fit 
subject for a volume, but must here be 
passed with a mere mention. Like brevity 
must needs be observed in referring to the 
spontaneous tendency towards Congrega- 
tional polity which is observable in recent 
movements for "reformation without tar- 
rying" that have been begun in state-church 
countries, whether Catholic or Protestant, 
as Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, and 
the Scandinavian countries. 

The crowning glory of the Story of the 
Congregationalists is the record of what 
they have done, not for the upbuilding of 
themselves into a strong and numerous 
sect, but, in honorable disregard of such 
ambition, for the glory of God in the serv- 
ice of his creatures. None can deny them 
this honor, that theircharity has been of that 
sort which " seeketh not its own." Taking 



A Wider Review 267 

the lead in the organization of large chari- 
ties, they have been controlled, in this work, 
by a veritable passion for fellowship with 
all Christians, insomuch that a large part of 
their greatest work stands without credit to 
themselves and even accredited to others. 
In *'the Leavening of the Nation " (to bor- 
row the apt title of Dr. Clark's interesting 
history), their work extends far beyond the 
nearly six thousand churches that are affili- 
ated with each other under the sectarian 
title. Few clergy-lists of American denomi- 
nations fail to show in places of highest 
usefulness the names of those trained in this 
discipline. It implies no disparagement to 
the good work of other orders of churches, 
to say (what none will deny) that the Con- 
gregationalists have been preeminently 
leaders in the higher education. Their 
monumental work is seen, not only in the 
chain of institutions stretching across the 
continent bearing the sectarian name, but 
beginning with Harvard and Yale and 



268 The Congregationalists 

Princeton and Schenectady and the Western 
Reserve, it includes with these many others 
into which the life and strength of their 
sons has passed, but which they did not 
care to limit by affixing their own name, 
and which they were even content to see 
taken under the exclusive direction of 
others. 

From their first germinant growth in the 
soil of New England, the Congregational 
churches have been consecrated by a special 
divine unction to the work of missions. 
From John Eliot to David Brainerd, and 
from Brainerd to Mills and his fellows be- 
side the Williamstown haystack, and from 
their day to this present, the bright succes- 
sion has never been interrupted. But as in 
other enterprises, so in this, they have not 
been careful to brand their work with their 
own trade-mark. By preference it has been 
from of old their choice that the fruits of 
their successful service should be indistin- 
guishably mingled with those of their fel- 



A Wider Review 269 

lov^-Christians; and when, in process of 
time, they have been found laboring in de- 
tachment from the rest of " the sacramental 
host, " it has been not because they have 
withdrawn from others, but because others 
have withdrawn from them. They may 
well afford this noble carelessness; for their 
record is on high, and even here on the 
blurred pages of our earthly history, it is 
no doubtful record. The rich and perennial 
fruits of labors that have been wrought on 
all the continents and islands under the di- 
rection of the London Missionary Society, 
the American Board of Commissioners for 
Foreign Missions, the American Home Mis- 
sionary Society, and the American Mission- 
ary Association are abundant and fragrant 
in every corner of the garden of the Lord. 
And their seed is in themselves after their 
kind. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

[The literature relating to the story of the 
Congregationalists is very copious, includ- 
ing, for its earlier periods, all the documents 
of New England history. Dr. H. M. Dex- 
ter's " Collections towards a Bibliography of 
Congregationalism" embraces '],2^o titles, 
and it is estimated by Prof. Williston 
Walker that if completed and brought up to 
date it, would include not less than 8,000. 
The following list contains the titles of 
some leading and easily accessible works 
which may be relied on to give ample refer- 
ences to the literature of the subject.] 

History of the Congregational Churches 
in the United States, by Williston Walker. 
(In American Church History Series.) New 
York, 1894. 

Congregationalists in America, by Albert 
E. Dunning. New York, 1894. 
270 



Bibliography 27 1 

The Congregationalism of the Last Three 
Hundred Years as Seen in Its Literature, 
by Henry Martyn Dexter. With a Biblio- 
graphical Appendix. New York, 1880. 

The Creeds and Platforms of Congrega- 
tionalism, by Williston Walker. New 
York, 1893. 

Genesis of the New England Churches, 
by Leonard Bacon. New York, 1874. 

History of the Unitarians in the United 
States, by Joseph Henry Allen. (In Ameri- 
can Church History Series.) New York, 
1894. 

Unitarianism in America, by George 
Willis Cooke. Boston, 1902. 

Leavening the Nation, by Joseph B. 
Clark. New York, 1903. 

History of New England, by John Gor- 
ham Palfrey. Five volumes. Boston, 
1859-90. 

Complete History of Connecticut, Civil 
and Ecclesiastical, by Benjamin Trumbull. 
New Haven, 1818. 



272 The Congregationalists 

Thirteen Historical Discourses on the 
Completion of Two Hundred Years from 
the Beginning of the First Church in New 
Haven, by Leonard Bacon. New Haven, 
1839. 

An account of Congregational usages both 
past and present may be sought in 

The Congregational Way, by George A. 
Boynton. Boston, 1904. 

For a view of the history of the Congre- 
gational churches in its relation to that of 
the American churches generally, it may be 
permitted to refer to 

A History of American Christianity, by 
Leonard Woolsey Bacon. (In American 
Church History Series.) New York, 1897. 



Index 



Albany Convention, 220. 

Allen, Professor Joseph Henry, 183, 271, 

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 

194, 234. 
American Home Missionary Society (now known as the 

Congregational H. M. S.), 199. 
American Missionary Association, 217, 228. 
Andover Theological Seminary, 162, 185, 208, 
Antinomian Controversy, 57. 
Arianism in Eastern Massachusetts, 169, 171. 
Arminianism reprobated in early New England, 142. 
Associations of ministers, 107. 
Awakening, The Great, 1 19-132. 
Awakening, The Second, 145. 

Bacon, Leonard, 211, 219, 237, 271, 272. 
Baldwin, Theron, 226. 
Baptism, conditions of, 77, 89, 112. 
Baptists, 194, 256. 

Beecher, Lyman, at Boston, 201 ; at Lane Seminary, 213. 
Belknap, Jeremy, early Unitarian, 159. 
Bellamy, Joseph, theologian, 137. 
Berkeley Temple Committee, 217, 235. 
Bible Societies, 197. 
Biblical science, 243. 

Boston, churches of, 47, 56, 80, 88, 158; become Uni- 
tarian, 170; Boston Council of 1^)65, 229. 
Boynton, George A., 272. 

273 



274 Index 



Bradford, Governor William, 31, 42. 

Brainerd, David, 129, 133. 

Brattle Church, Boston, 88. 

Brewster, "William, of Plymouth, 25. 

Browne, John and Samuel, schismatists at Salem, 42, 60. 

Browne, Robert, early Separatist, 24. 

Buckminster, Joseph Stevens, 163. 

Burial Hill Declaration, 230. 

Bushnell, Horace, his " Christian Nurture," 78, 238. 

Cambridge, Synods at, 59, 61, 65. 

Cambridge Platform, 65 ; modern departures from, 68. 

Cartwright, Thomas, 15. 

Channing, William Ellery, 163, 202, 205. 

Charter of Massachusetts transferred to New England, 46. 

Christian Connection of Congregational Churches, 257. 

Christian Endeavor Societies, 241. 

Chauncy, Charles, 78. 

Chauncy, Charles, Jr., 128, 158. 

Church instituted at Salem, 38; at Charlestown (Boston), 
47 ; at New Haven, 49. 

Church principles, 28, 66; of Dr. Emmons, 188, 224, 

Church-building fund, 222. 

City evangelization, 243 ; disqualification for, 245. 

Clark, Joseph B,, 267, 271, 

Codman, John, ordained at Dorchester, 163. 

Colleges, 108, 138, 150, 185, 209, 211, 226, 267. 

Colman, Benjamin, 90, 122, 123. 

Confessions of Faith, 75, 87, no, 230, 233. 

Congregationalism, defined, 9 ; not an imported polity, 
13 ; gradually evolved, 55 ; formulated in Cambridge 
Platform, 67; later modifications, 67, 88; modified 
by Say brook Platform, 94 ; democratic reaction, 97 ; 
spiritual quickening, 120; fanatical disorders, 125; 
controlled by civil authority, 53, 126; expansion 
and activity, 134; theology, 135; not sectarian, 41, 
^3' 73» 141 » home missions, 144 ; alliance with 
Presbyterian Church in Plan of Union, 149; dis- 
ruption, 157 ; consequent modification into a sec- 



Index 275 



tarian polity, 188; foreign missions, 193; organiza- 
tions for beneficence, 195; conflict with drunken- 
ness, 203 ; with slavery, 207 ; Plan of Union abro- 
gated, 221; westward expansion, 222; two con- 
trasted types of, 223; national councils, 221, 
229, 231 ; tendency to confederation, 236 ; internal 
revolution, 238 ; need of adaptation to city evangeli- 
zation, 243 ; to the administration of large churches, 
245 r influence extending beyond bounds of sect, 
255, and of nation, 263. 

Connecticut, adopts system of classical church polity, 92, 
96; disorders suppressed by legislature, 125; leads 
in home missions, 144. 

Consociation aimed at in Massachusetts, in proposals of 
1705, 91 ; achieved in Connecticut, 92, 96. 

Cotton, John, at Boston in Lincolnshire, 45; in New 
England, 56, 59, 61, 62. 

Councils, national, 221, 229, 231. See also Synods. 

Covenant, in institution of church, 28, 38, 47, 50. 

Covenant, Half-way, 76. 

Dartmouth College, 134. 

Davenport, James, 129, 131, 146. 

Davenport, John, of New Haven, 49, 62, 79, 80. 

Decadence in second generation, 83, and later. III. 

Dedham decision, 167. 

Democracy in state or church disfavored in early New 

England, 27,53; movement towards led by John 

Wise, 98, 106, 141. 
Dexter, Henry Martyn, 270, 271. 
Dickinson, Jonathan, 122. 
Discipline, church, 36, 86, 103. 

Dissenters, Baptist, Quaker and Episcopalian, 106, 143. 
Dorchester, England, source of Puritan migration, 17, 

45 ; in Mass., 48. 
Dunning, Albert E., 270. 
Dwight, Timothy, 137, 146, 149, 185, 204. 

Eaton, Theophilus, of New Haven, 49. 



276 



Index 



Education, See Colleges and Theological. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 117, 128, 133, 134, 138. 

Edwards, Jonathan the younger, 137, 150, 207. 

EHot, John, 108, 109. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, declines to observe the Lord's 
Supper, 177; gives offense by pantheism, 178. 

Emmons, Nathanael, 137, 186; his ecclesiastical Jacob- 
inism, 188, 224, 237. 

Endicott, Governor John, 20, 31, 42. 

English Congregationalism, a later growth, 263; its 
honorable record, 265. 

Evarts, Jeremiah, 205, 208. 

Fellowship of Churches, 43, 53, 106, 141. 

Fmney, Charles Gaylord, evangelist and theologian, 

213, 219. 
Freeman, James, of King's Chapel, 157, 164. 
Fuller, Samuel, physician and deacon at Plymouth, 30. 

Gay, Ebenezer, pastor at Hingham, 158. 

Great Awakening, 1 19. 

Griffin, Edward Dorr, of Andover and Boston, 191. 

Half-way covenant, 76, 112, 114. 

Hartford First Church adopts dogmatic test of member- 
ship, 190. 

Harvard College, 108, 113; seats a Unitarian in chair 
of theology, 161 ; its temporary decline, 186. 

Higginson, Francis, minister at Salem, 20, 34, 38. 

Hingham Church, Presbyterian tendency, 61, 74; in 
charge of Ebenezer Gay, 158, and of Henry Ware, 
161 ; its ancient meeting-house, Frontispiece. 

Home Missionary Societies, 145, 199, 

Hooker, Richard, his " Polity," 15. 

Hooker, Thomas, founder of Hartford, 61, 92. 

Hopkins, Samuel, theologian, 137, 207. 

Hopkinsianism, 157. 

Hutchinson, Mrs. Ann, 56, 60. 



Index 277 



Illinois Band, 226. 

Independent, newspaper, 218. 

Indians, American, conversion of, 133, 134. 

Iowa Band, 227. 

Journalism, religious, 147, 218. 

King's Chapel becomes Unitarian, 157. 

Lamson, Alvan, ordained at Dedham, 167. 
Legislatures controlling churches, 53, 58, 92, 126. 
License to preach, 107. 
London, a Puritan centre, 45. 

Massachusetts Company sends settlers to " The Bay," 
and ministers, 20 ; and brings over its charter, 46, 

Mather, Cotton, 109, 207. 

Mather, Increase, 85, 91, 109, 165. 

Mather, Richard, 62. 

Mayhew, Jonathan, early Unitarian, 159. 

Membership in church, conditions of, 28, 64, 73, 81, 89, 
104, 112, 116, 142, 189, 224. 

Millenary petition, 14. 

Mills, Samuel John, Jr., 193, 197, 199. 

Ministry, early theories, 34, 40, 52 ; how far abandoned, 
69, 71, 90, 105, 167. 

Missions, foreign, 193, 268; home, 144. 

Morse, Jedediah, 164; Sidney, 218. 

National Councils, 221, 229, 231. 
Newbury, Presbyterian tendency at, 61. 
New Haven, planted and organized, 49; merged in 
Connecticut, 80, 102. 

Oberlin College and Seminary, 211 ; Council at, 

231. 
Occum, Samson, 134. 
Old Calvinists, 157. 
Old South Church, Boston, 80, 163, 169, 229, 



278 



Index 



Ordination, at Salem, 34, 40; English ordination in- 
valid, 40, 52; definition, 71, 105. 

Orthodox secessions in Eastern Massachusetts, 168; de- 
velop great vigor, 186; tend to theological excess, 
191, and to a sectarian polity, 188. 

Palfrey, John Gorham, 271. 

Parish system of New England, 54, 102, 126, 166, 168. 

Park, Edwards Amasa, 137. 

Park Street Church, Boston, 189, 208. 

Parker, Theodore, disfellowshipped by Unitarians for 
heresy, 179. 

Payson, Edward, his doctrine of human nature, 192. 

Philip's war, 85. 

PhilHps, George, of Watertown, 53. 

Pierpont, James, of New Haven, 109 ; Sarah, 1 18. 

Pilgrims of Plymouth, 19, 23, 25, 27. 

Plan of Union, 150, 152, 198, 200 ; abrogated, 220, 221. 

Platform, Cambridge, 65 ; Saybrook, 94. 

Plymouth, church at, is divided, 160. 

Presbyterian Church, aided by New England, 149 ; in- 
fluenced by it, 151, 190, 200. 

Presbyterianism of early New England churches, 28, 53, 
55, 105, 140, 152. 

Princeton College, 138. 

Proposals of 1705, 92. 

Puritanism in England, not Congregationalist, 13; prin- 
ciples of, 14, 16. 

Reforming Synod, 85, iii. 
Robinson, John, 26, 29. 

Salem, settled and organized, 20, 23, 33. 

Savoy Confession, 87, no. 

Saybrook Synod, 93 ; platform, 93. 

Scrooby, church at, 25. 

Sectarian division not intended by early Congregation- 

alists, 41, 63, 73, 142 ; sectarian polity a later 

growth, 225. 



Index 279 

Separatism, 16, 20, 24, 51, 62. 
Separatists in Connecticut, 130, 143. 
Shipherd, John J., 212. 
Skelton, Samuel, pastor at Salem, 34. 
Slavery, 207, 215, 220, 222. 
Smalley, John, theologian, 137. 
Smith, Ralph, Separatist minister, 41. 
Society, ecclesiastical, 104. 
Stoddard, Solomon, 81, 113, ii7» "P- 
Sturtevant, Julian M., 226, 237. 
Synods, 59,65,85, 114, 126. 

Taylor, Nathaniel W., 137. 

Tennent, Gilbert, 125. 

Theological education, 137, 162, 185, 187. 

Theology of New England, 134. 

Transcendentalism, 176. 

Trumbull, Benjamin, 271. 

Unitarianism, its brilliant beginning, 170; its biblical 
methods; doctrine of human nature, 172; adhered 
to Congregational principles, 173; failed of the 
duty of parish churches, 174; sterility ; usefully in- 
fluential, 176; disturbed by Western Issue, 180; 
initial success, 182; narrowly Hmited, 183; slow 
growth ; forward movement, 252. 

Vane, Sir Harry, at Boston, 57. 

Voluntary societies for beneficence, 196; ready check on 
abuses, 235. 

Walker, Williston, 65, 270, 271. 

Ware, Henry, 161. 

Ware, Henry, Jr., 17S. 

Washington Band, 227. 

West, The, 144- . . 

Western Reserve, home missions in, 144; university, 

268. 
Westminster Confession, 75, 1 10. 



28o Index 

Wesley, John, 122. 
Wlieelock, Eleazar, 134. 
Wheelwright, John, 56, 5S, 60. 
White, John, of Dorchester, 17, 45, 49. 
Whitefield, George, 122. 
Williams, Roger, 60, 109. 
Williams College, 185, 193. 
Wilson, John, of Boston, 47. 
Winthrop, Governor John, 46, 57, 59. 
Wise, John, 98, 106, 152. 

Yale College, 113, 139, 146, 185. 



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